Paying the weatherman

I don’t know about you, but I expect the National Weather Service to provide weather information — all weather information it collects — for free.

That may make things difficult for folks like AccuWeather and Weather.com, as the NWS keeps making its info easier to use — but, frankly, basic “commodity information” like that strikes me as something that should be available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. And if that puts a crimp into someone’s business model, that’s just tough.

Of course, that’s not how the Weather Biz sees it. Which is why they’ve gotten Rick Santorum to propose a bill that would, apparently, “prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.” Because that is, of course, the highest priority our government faces today.

But Barry Myers, AccuWeather’s executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

“The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people’s lives and property,” said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, “It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.'”

NOAA has taken no position on the bill. But Ed Johnson, the weather service’s director of strategic planning and policy, said his agency is expanding its online offerings to serve the public.

“If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that’s really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time,” Johnson said. “You don’t just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is.”

And since they’re already having to measure and record it, why not publish it — either in nice web pages or raw data files that others can scrape and repackage.

See, that’s both the threat and the opportunity. Someone who claims that the data should be protected so that only folks who want to sell it can give it out miss the opportunities of the Internet and the Information Age. The model is not being able to sell the information (by subscriptions or by ads) by restricting the information flow itself, but by providing the superior, more usefl presentation. The former is monopolistic, the latter is entrepreneurial. Which do you think serves the public better?

Not that it seems to be what Santorum is worried about:

He also said expanded federal services threaten the livelihoods of private weather companies. “It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free,” Santorum said.

Ah. So perhaps we should call this the Private Weather Company Full Employment Act of 2005. That would certainly be more accurate. If less of an easy sell.

(via BoingBoing)