ODI advises UK to force Google, Apple and Uber to share mapping data

“The UK government should force Google, Apple, Uber and others to share their mapping data so that other companies can develop autonomous cars, drones and transport apps, according to an influential campaign group,” Aliya Ram and Madhumita Murgia report for Financial Times.
“The Open Data Institute, co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT and Nigel Shadbolt, artificial intelligence professor at the University of Oxford, warned on Tuesday that big tech companies had become ‘data monopolies,'” Ram and Murgia report. “The group said the UK’s Geospatial Commission should ask the companies to share map data with rivals and the public sector in a collaborative database or else force them to do so with legislation.”
“Companies such as Google, Apple and Uber have invested millions of dollars in building vast data pools that document everything from landscape features such as waterways and roads to data on how traffic flows, how land is used and where boundaries lie. Concern is mounting over how such data pools can stifle competition by making it more difficult for small businesses to innovate without access to equally rich information,” Ram and Murgia report. “Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, told a conference in Lisbon this year that data dominance had become a concern. ‘When just a few companies hold lots and lots of data, it can become very hard for anyone else to compete against them.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Companies have each invested millions of dollars and untold man-hours in building their mapping data. It’s their data, not for any governments or quasi-governments to steal by force.
Tim Berners-Lee has sung “Kumbaya” far too many times.