> The German Weather Service (DWD) will no longer be allowed to provide general weather forecasts in a free mobile phone app. … [DWD] will only be permitted to offer extreme weather warnings for free and … a DWD app offering general weather forecasts must contain advertisements or be purchased by users.
The government service is forced to put ads in its free app. WTF?
We‘ve got a problem in germany with anything spent for by tax money. If something is done by tax money and some private company is doing the same with their own money the will go to court because the other one has an unfair advantage.
For example we have some tv channels being run by tax money (not absolutely correct, its a forced pay for everyone not included in taxes but its basically the same) without any ads. Any many free private channels fiddled with ad pauses. The tax ones wanted to put their movies online in a netflix style for free long before netflix but the private ones wonnin court because it would be unfair. Nowadays they are allowed to put them online but only for 30 days after airing in tv, everything else would be unfair to the real low-quality free channels...
Lets say that the government and DWD developed equivalent apps but DWD did it at half the cost. If the government app has to charge users based on its costs, then it will be twice as expensive, and lose out to the more efficient private company. But if they are just allowed to give it out to consumers for free (which a private company can't do) then it will dominate the market even though it is not the best use of resources. I assume that is the rationale for this law.
Maybe they can similarly spin off the weather app into a company with some kind of status that retains some of its original purpose (which I guess is supplying weather information to German nationals).
It's shit like this that gets people to go from "Capitalism needs tweaks" to "It is rotten to the core".
It should be completely obvious that the government has an interest in providing weather details to its citizens as a whole for planning and safety. Private citizens and companies are not entitled to markets, especially when it comes to public knowledge and safety!
I think the difference is the guaranteed budgets vs. commercial budget that needs to be proven (to a bank for a loan) or earned.
But then again, I also think this verdict is stupid and makes no sense, next we're going to have to ban free access to current laws because a law book maker firm wants to make some money.
Funny that you mention it. German laws are published via the 'Bundesanzeiger Verlag' which is a fully privatized publisher owned by the DuMont Group.
This lead to the fact, that you couldn't search, copy or print laws online for free. In reaction to this the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany then opened up a guerilla portal in late 2018 which allowed this.
Because of this, it is planed for 2022, that all german laws will be published online and the contract with DuMont comes to an end.
Almost as bad is the monopoly of "Bundesanzeiger" in regards to the mandatory publishing of the annual balance sheets of companies beyond a certain size. Everyone has to publish there, and you only get access to an API (which AFAIK still gives you fairly unstructured data) if you pay a hefty sum. This makes any open/reproducable research into industry trends really difficult.
Yeah, I have seen similar thins in a lot of modern and (modern-ish) countries where due to historical reasoning or organic growth some commercial business gets hold of a piece of public functionality that really should not be encapsulated that way.
But as long as it's only a few unheard voices complaining about it and no broad law stating 'public money, public data, public access" it's pretty hard to turn it back in to a real public service.
The problem with most of the public vs. private stuff is that 'the public' often needs something (i.e. a bridge that doesn't collapse) yet a commercial entity with the goal of maximising profit will probably have no problem with a collapsing bridge as long as it's cheaper than maintaining it.
Some needs are worth putting it in a public baseline. And sometimes grey areas work (i.e. a public service fulfilled by a private entity but then checked by a public instance). Some stuff may not need to be public, i.e. kegs of beer. It's great when you want one, but it's not a base public need and not a shared need (unlike infrastructure, health, security, for general survival in places packed with too many people like big cities). But then a commercial entity might see an opportunity to sell things as a public baseline (why have basic weather forecasts when you can add 'bbq weather compatibility forecasts' or 'can I play golf tomorrow' functionality. But now that company has a hard time getting people to pay for it because that extra stuff that you didn't need anyway isn't attractive to anyone who just wants to know if they need to bring an umbrella. So ban the simple stuff and now your complex stuff has a place in the market. It's practically setting yourself up not to win on your own merit but 'removing' any opposition. Or so it seems to us bystanders. I don't actually know why they thought this was a good idea to have a lawsuit about.
The Deutsche Bahn in Germany is pretty much doing that. They pay for maintenance, the Government pays for repair. So they save money on maintenance and let the Government pay for the repairs.
And it shows, in case anybody was wondering. The percentage of trains that break down in the middle of the field, that have to detach a few carriages in some random train station so they can keep going with the rest of the train, or that barely make it to the destination but then are stuck there unable to move is truly astounding.
Planes have been falling out of the sky due to commercial reasoning. And most maintenance is done the way it is because it had to be put in to law to force a businesses to do it.
That is correct, you get some sort of mix or grey area. I think there was an interview with some of the engineers with an airplane manufacturer that described the changes after a merger where both companies were general commercial companies with profit in mind (and shareholders etc) but one had a company culture of doing it right and the other wanted to lower that down to 'right enough' hoping to make a bit more money that they didn't actually need on top of the billions of profit. But that's what minmaxing with do...
There is more to it. Usually people don’t like to take plane from airline if they have a lot of accident.
If i build a bridge and it collapse, how I’m making money now? If I have other bridges, people might stop using them if they are known to collapse and kill people.
It's not as clear cut as it seems: I have spent untold millions on "DE Weather App" and this one funded by taxpayers drives out of business. How is that fair?
This argument can be made against anything the government does.
* Should the government not build roads because it might hurt the profits of toll road companies?
* Should government workers not be able to open source their code or data because it might hurt the profits of software companies?
* Should the government not have an army because it hurts the profits of the private military forces?
You are essentially saying that the government should not be able to provide any value to its people because it might hurt the profits of a private entity.
This argument seems especially strange in this context considering the companies in question are themselves using government provided data for their weather apps, i.e. the government is doing the data collection for those companies. This naturally prevents other companies from profiting from weather data collection as well. I wonder why these companies are not protesting that, and suing the government for providing this data in the first place?
I think the real reason behind the ruling is here:
> ... the German Weather Service, based in Offenbach, Hesse, had exceeded the legal mandate for its activities with this offer ...
In other words, if DWD's mandate had included offering this service to the public then it wouldn't have matter that it undermined competition. Even if you think a service like this ought to be subsidized, it isn't a good idea to have rogue government departments "competing" with privately funded alternatives at public expense on their own initiative.
> It isn't a good idea to have rogue government departments "competing" with privately funded alternatives at public expense on their own initiative.
Why not? Does every minor thing that any government funded organisation or employee wants to do need to be approved three-fold by layers and layers of bureaucracy?
That seems absolutely ridiculous. We are talking about something very minor here: making an app that displays regular weather information, where they already had an app that displayed extreme weather information. This is not some immense initiative they are undertaking here. This was likely done by a single person that thought "hey, we are gathering this data, why not display it in our app".
I am working as a scientist on government funding, should I require approval in three-fold by congress before I publish a paper, open-source any code or do any research at all, because a private entity might want to monetise something similar to that research and I might negatively impact their profitability by putting that in the public domain?
> Does every minor thing that any government funded organisation or employee wants to do need to be approved three-fold by layers and layers of bureaucracy?
You're exaggerating, but yes. Everything which is done through force, including anything funded with taxes or granted special legal status or protection from competition, requires careful oversight to ensure that it isn't using more force than necessary to accomplish the approved goals. Even the seemingly minor things. That's the price for getting your organization funded through the government. Don't like it? Do your work in the private sector where you can manage your budget as you please, since it's your own money.
> ...should I require approval in three-fold by congress before I publish a paper, open-source any code or do any research at all, because a private entity might want to monetise something similar to that research...?
Are these things part of what you're being paid to do as part of your research?
I couldn't care less about how it impacts others' profitability. If you're doing it at your own expense, not taking advantage of special privilege based on your position (such as free access to the data when everyone else must pay), and there is no conflict of interest, then there is no issue. However, if you were taking advantage of government funding or status to carry out tasks that weren't directly related to what you were being paid to do—like developing and maintaining an app backed by data not freely available to the public—then that would be a problem.
And really, does this need to be carried out by the government directly? If the DWD were an ordinary private organization, either for-profit or non-profit, contracted by the government for a set fee through a fair bidding process to provide certain data to the public then the DWD would be free to set their own agenda and develop and maintain this app at their own expense so long as that use of the data was consistent with their contract. The government gets what they paid for, the organization gets to do things their way, competition is fair, and (almost) everyone's happy.
This sounds like a horrible way of running a society. This is like the government intentionally keeping the tax code complicated and making filing taxes difficult so companies can exist that then fix that problem. You are forcing the government to be immensely inefficient, for no other reason than that a small number of people can profit from those inefficiencies at the expense of improving society as a whole.
The government is gathering this data. Building your business on top of what another entity is doing (government or company) is always a risk. The exact same risk is taken if you build something on top of the API or data of another company. If you were to build a Twitter client and then Twitter would make their own client available you are shit out of luck. That is the risk you take when you build something on somebody else's infrastructure. I honestly don't see why the government is so special that it should be completely handcuffed and prevented from making meaningful positive changes in society just so the profits of a small amount of people can be protected.
If the government does something to improve society and you can't compete and make a profit, do something else. Would you start a firefighting service and then complain that the government offers this service for free? At that point, why have a government at all?
So I guess that the question is: Does society benefit enough from everyone having access to free weather information, outweigh the harm done by businesses risking bancrupcy because their product is now something that should be free? And also that other businesses start to wonder if it's their product that will be "should be free" in the future?
what if the "free" version is not as good, yet most people will use it because it's "free"? Meaning very few will pay for the best version. All will close shop and bureaucrats will collect their salaries while making so-so free weather apps, backed by tax dollars. Is this outcome better? I use several websites for weather and I know which one is more accurate, they differ.
Why isn't the German government making a government funded car to ruin Volkswagen or Mercedes?
It's not about accuracy, weather data us provided by the government in most countries, the third parties are using the same data. You could make a case for better UI or UX but not really data...
Every government has to have e weather service since it's vital to agro, fishing, daily life etc. But they can release the API or whatever that doesn't drive out of business other weather companies.
They are trade rules: for example, if USA subsidizes Boeing they can be sued and fined in international trade courts, since it hurts, say German companies. (Chinese companies, Airbus etc are routinely accused of having an unfair advantage, due to government subsidies.)
But the cases you mention are about the Government helping a private entity make a profit. In the weather app's case it's the Government (broadly speaking) giving tax payers something "for free". This last case is far more nuanced than your comparison makes it out to be.
And I'm pretty sure most tax payers will pretty much always choose a free app that gives them basic weather data a few days in advance than a paid app that gives them bells and whistles. So the Government is catering for the vast majority in this case.
>Why isn't the German government making a government funded car to ruin Volkswagen or Mercedes?
I guess that's just the same question again.
Does society benefit enough from everyone having access to free cars, outweigh the harm done by businesses risking bancrupcy because their product is now something that should be free? And also that other businesses start to wonder if it's their product that will be "should be free" in the future?
I wouldn't consider it inconsequent to say "yes" on the first question but "no" on the other...
I mean, if you spent _millions_ developing a weather app, you're just bad at business and doomed to fail regardless of whether there is a government funded competitor or not.
Indeed. Although I always think that any software produced by the government should be Free Software. It's stupid for taxpayer funded software to not be open and extensible by citizens.
Not to avoid unfair competition, though. That's just for funding because they're not entirely tax-funded. In this case, the DWD is already tax funded and wants to provide its tax-funded information to the people who paid for it.
It's a way of funding them as good as any other. Personally I prefer it: I don't watch television so from my point of view the budget of the public TV channels should be as small as possible.
i don't go to the library often because i buy books, but i don't think the library should be ad funded, I'm happy to pay for it in case someone else needs it, their knowledge will benefit me later anyway
That seems like a dishonest comparison. While it's true public television has some divulgation programmes, they are usually pushed to the secondary channels and they aren't watched by many people. If public television consisted only of those programmes, its budget would be much, much lower, and I would be happy to pay for it.
The truth is that public TV nowadays contains lots of series and movies (in many cases, American), cooking programmes, tabloid celebrity stuff, etc that they think they must do to stay competitive with private TV. And that's rubbish.
TV is about as far away from beneficial to an individual or society as you can get without straight up poisoning or stabbing people. The less it is consumed, the better. You're not helping anyone or society by encouraging others to watch it.
No. There are anti-competitive laws that prevent the federal institutions to prop up a tax-funded competition to commercial products, unless specifically allowed/mandated by law.
I'm not saying it's the case here, but why not? The law could say they are forced to run X minutes of ads per hour, or that X% of their funding must come from ads.
This is beyond me. So if I open a pay-to-visit park in Germany, can I get the courts to close down all open-access parks? This isn't natural competition, more like subsidizing by faking scarcity. What's more, the public sector should (contrary to this development) provide more internet services and resources: that's a good thing. Their financial incentives in many cases are better than the private sector's. And, they should do it for free where it makes sense, like when you're already indirectly financing the public weather department.
Courts in the German state of Baden-Württemberg also recently forcibly privatized the State Forestry Service's logging operations because they were considered a monopoly (the "Forstkartell") and the sawmill industry sued in hope of lower timber prices.
This forced the regional Forestry Service departments to split into two organizations - the logging operations and the government authority, now regulating its former self. Government and state forestry services are now supposed compete with each other on prices.
Of course, this ended up increasing timber prices due to the resulting mountains of paperwork, the organizational chaos that would be expected from splitting up a hundreds of years old government organization, and the extra personnel/training required.
Lawyers got paid and tax payer money was burnt, and the main purpose of the Forestry Service - environmental protection and research - suffers from the overhead.
Oh, and the state-ran broadcasting organizations need to delete productions - paid for by everyone's broadcast tax money - from their online media libraries after a few weeks because private media organizations sued because it supposedly competes with their for-profit streaming services.
As you mentioned it might be a regional thing. But maybe I'm being idealistic considering the US's general shift away from markets and the cronyism in certain pet industries.
> Germany also killed Walmart there via existing entrenched shops simply complaining about the price competition.
First time I heard that. The generally accepted explanation over here is that they couldn't match prices of established chains that had well optimized supply chains, and that they absolutely failed to account for cultural differences regarding how to deal with customers and employees.
Seems like they sold products below cost to drive out competition, with this apparently not being allowed in some US states / Germany, at least for staple food.
It reminded me precisely of the situation in the US with the tax prep and filing process. A service the government could provide for free (which, by many estimates, would cost them less to do than maintaining the current system) but is instead propped up by an industry that has no reason to exist and makes life worse for most individuals.
This sucks. Basically it comes down to the data being collected and processed with tax payers money.
Providing data payed by the tax payers to said tax payers for free is considered an unfair advantage in a free market because the other market participants have to invest money to collect the data and need therefore another business model (advertising, paid app, and so on). As the state isn't allowed to unfairly treat one market participant better, the taxpayers loose.
Neoliberalism is the order of the day, in Europe, just as much as it is in the US and UK and Australia and elsewhere.
The only reason you might think we are any different is because we have some grandfathered social-welfare programs that are just too popular to be quickly (!) dismantled. But even those are being eroded slowly.
Actually, point forecasts are also free – but only for places where they already have to create the forecasts (you can find those on their FTP for free).
It’s high quality data, for free, you’d just have to build your own frontend.
Don't German citizens pay for this information through taxes? Is this different from forbidding citizens from using the police instead of private security companies because they're providing security services "for free"?
Well, the security part (extreme weather warnings) were and will be free, just the weather prediction part is not. And from the brief period where it was free I remember it as being a impressively good app, completely unexpected from a government agency, which was probably one of the reasons the company sued...
Edit: The data is also freely available for private use on their website, just not as nice and compact.
Yes. We are all paying the DWD through taxes. The DWD provides its data to private companies for free, including WetterOnline, the company that sued. All the companies do is providing apps and web sites for visualization of the data.
I think the main reason for the lawsuit was that the DWD app is really, really good – in my opinion it's the best weather app we have in Germany. This made it very difficult to compete with – it was free, ad-free and good.
This kind of bullshit will only get worse, with investor-state dispute settlement agreements int trade deals forbidding governments to take on new responsibilities whenever there is a private company in that space.
> The private Bonn-based firm considered the DWD app anti-competitive as it put commercial providers at a disadvantage since they could not provide the information for free.
Is the official data not free? Maybe the solution should rather be to make the data free, rather than make the official app non-free?
The court said that DWD is overstepping their mandate. Apparently they are mandated only to provide the data and not to compete with private businesses.
This is also why the Public TV channels have to delete their content from their free Video on Demand services after a certain amount of time. They are only mandated to broadcast TV and not offer VOD.
Both of these issues stem from the fact that the mandate of these public services was written so long ago and with the limitations of the time in mind. Of course the DWD was not supposed to provide this data to everyone, that would have been too expensive at the time. It was just cheaper to provide the data to private weather companies and have them distribute it, but now it is comparatively easy to make an app to provide useful data to everyone.
For public TV as well. When their mandate was defined there was no VOD and that is why they can only provide it in this very limited way.
This is really stupid in my opinion and should be changed.
Sadly, no, this is not an example of "old regulations that don't work for today". It's an example of successful lobbying, since when the DWDs role was redefined in 2015 these rules specifically set up, with the stated goal of having it not compete with private providers.
Well, the main task of the DWD is to monitor and document climate & weather in Germany and warn about risks. Providing consumer facing products is not part of it, and, to my knowledge, never has been, that was something they did on their own, not part of their mandate.
Firefighting used to be a private service since Roman times until recently. Some old buildings in my city still bear a plaque saying "Fire insured" signaling that in case of fire, they should be saved. If not, the firefighters would just control the spreading to other (insured) buildings.
Yep. People talk about "peak capitalism", "late capitalism" etc. but they don't realize the world used to be much, much more extreme. Even until a few centuries ago, even public cops or prosecutors weren't a thing.
Isn't that why people call it late capitalism, because it is in its final phases? Pure, unfettered capitalism has been dwindling for a long time, mostly because of issues like slavery, severe exploitation of workers and forced child labor. Yet still many issues remain.
I would say peak capitalism is colonial times, when companies had private armies and people were enslaved/massacred for profit.
You joke about firefighting but you couldn't have picked a worse example. That is one of the major misconceptions people have about required local services - it's not required.
Note that this is the status quo since 2017, when the DWD lost in court the first time.
At that time they began to charge 1,99€ and have done so ever since.
I've happily paid that, as in my opinion it is one of the most reliable weather forecasts for Germany, not only for the general audience, but also for prosumers. For example, they provide high quality precipitation radar images, I regularly can determine the onset of rain with minute accuracy.
It only makes this news sound even worse. Weather information only exists because the source data is freely shared, thinking anyone can lock down this information is obscene.
In my (German) opinion, the court did a great job by stating only that they need ads in general but leaving the amount undetermined.
Most likely, the DWD will show a one-time ad to everyone activating the free weather service. Most likely, they can even make it 5 minutes of uninterrupted ads, because everyone knows that it's a one-time thing and it's easy enough to ignore your phone for 5 minutes if you can choose the time when the ad plays.
And afterwards, the DWD has realized a year worth of ad revenue per user and is free to provide the service for free and ad free like they used to.
So while technically WetterOnline won, it won't have much consequences.
That said, I myself am a paid subscriber for WetterOnline because their worldwide real-time radar videos are super helpful, and the German weather service obviously provides data only for Germany. So I'm not really sure why they felt the need to sue in the first place.
The courts are run by people in the same unpopular political establishment as the rest of the country. Yes, they absolutely are a political instrument, although some people like to pretend otherwise when they get their policies undemocratically rammed into law through the courts.
All legal systems make utilitarian considerations. Furthermore, legal systems like Germany's are even more respectful of common sense than ones based on English common law.
> The courts are run by people in the same unpopular political establishment as the rest of the country.
I don't disagree, but that's de facto. Nominally, they're independent and Germany doesn't rely on judge's guesstimates as much, they are supposed to apply the laws, not create them, which is why the German Constitutional Court has been criticized for becoming politically activist instead of remaining neutral.
Since they're de facto appointed by the political establishment, you can't expect them to not be carefully selected for "obedience by accident" (they're independent, they just happen to think the same way), but you can also not do it too obviously if you don't want to shake the cage too much or people might disregard the courts completely.
Government institutions with mission creep issues that start to grow is a common problem in Germany, and the courts regularly tell them to stop, this isn't a new development.
It sets a dangerous precedence tho and Germans are already paying for it indirectly with taxes, since DWD is mostly run privately, but it’s resources and workforce is public.
What’s next? Will the ARD and ZDF Apps become subscription based because of Netflix and amazon prime, even tho we pay for GEZ already?
The "next" already happened to a degree, quite a while ago. ARD and ZDF have online archives ("mediathek") where most content must be de-publicized (removed) after a while because the commercial competitors bitched to the politicians who make the rules for the public broadcasters. But now there is a ZDF channel on amazon prime that I can pay for again after having paid my mandatory fees (GEZ) already, yay.
The online offerings of ARD and ZDF also had and have to remove a ton of old content (articles and such), and had to discontinue a lot of services, especially interactive services such as chat platforms, that weren't directly connected to their basic information mandate.
And in 2017 some commercial newspapers successfully won a court decision against the ARD's tagesshow app (tagesschau being their flagship prime time newscast), meaning the app (and also the tagesschau website) had to remove a lot of texts that were "not directly related" to the content of their news shows[1]. Why were they successful? Because the law already prohibits the ARD and ZDF from being to "press-like".
... and the main reason for the ARD/ZDF to have useless apps and content on their websites in the first place is so that they can demand not-tax from everyone instead of only those who still own a TV.
Sorry, but this is just not the case. The mediathek apps are still rather useful, which have their live broadcasts and also an archive of their content. Most stuff, except for live TV such as football (soccer) games, I almost always watch on demand in their mediathek.
I regularly use tagesschau.de, I regularly listen to their radio stations, via apps.
I personally think the ARD/ZDF are important to have, and also keep the commercial players on their feet a little. And provide a lot of programming, like documentaries and information shows that are good to have but that commercial players wouldn't touch (or if e.g. RTL did their own versions, I would dread the outcome).
I also think the GEZ fees are a little too high, and they waste a ton of money in their bureaucracy. I'd rather have the BBC (which Boris wants to dismantle) than the ARD/ZDF, but this is the next best thing.
I couldn't disagree more about the ARD/ZDF being useful. I'd even go as far as saying they are harmful (biased news, promoting gambling, ...). But we can agree to disagree on that.
What I think is absolutely not OK is the current funding method using a compoulsory payment. If you say that public TV is beneficial to society then it should be funded through regular taxes which are collected equitably (ie. based on income). If however publicly funded TV is not a benefit to society then there should be a way to opt out. There was before ARD/ZDF added these online services.
Here in the US I have a free, open source desktop weather app (OpenWeatherMap) that lets me set the location to many German locales. On my phone I have something similar. Surely people in Germany could install these same apps? Who is paying for weather in Germany?
The point is DWD is tax financed service to process weather data and to distribute it to the once that need such weather data. As it is pay by taxes, the data is distributed free of charge. The are many services, even the one you just mentioned, that uses exactly that data to distribute it further. DWD build its own app to inform about severe weather conditions as this is also allowed by DWD. Then DWD added just the regular weather data to the exact same app including rain radar and such things, that OpenWeatherMap for example does not provide. DWD got sued for this by the companies who using the exact same DWD weather data and selling it to the customers either by adding ads or by subscription.
By the way OpenWeatherMap is providing just basic weather data that is actually allowed to be included into the app for free. We are talk about much more detailed data.
It's not obvious that those applications are using the data from DWD. It's possible that they're using (for example) global forecasts from the ECMWF (Euopean Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts), or even global forecasts produced by the US.
The DWD's contribution would be higher-resolution (and presumably therefore more accurate) forecasts for the region immediately around Germany.
Is it necessary to create a new app? Because it seems to me that the source code of the current app its already owned by the Germans and should be made available.
It was way worse than that. Back in 2005, Rick Santorum, the republican senator from AccuWeather's home state, introduced a bill that sought to privatize the National Weather Service's weather data and forecast products. AccuWeather's Founder and CEO, brothers Joel and Barry Myers, were among Santorum's biggest campaign donors, and they argued that the NWS forecast products were unfairly preventing them from making money on their similar products. Accuweather used the NWS data themselves, so they sought to prevent the NWS from publishing the data publicly, while preserving their own access to it.
Not coincidentally, Donald Trump has nominated Barry Meyers to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
At that time there was also an effort to privatize aviation data, the Aeronav products that the FAA produces. It was a huge clusterfuck but in the end calmed down.
In both cases the result would be significantly worse applications for consumers. There's a lot of fantastic weather apps built on free NWS and NOAA data, things like Dark Sky, that would be impossible if the data were not freely available. Same for aviation with apps like Foreflight.
This is very surprising for a country like Germany, which has a long history of providing public services for the common good, rather than profit oriented motives.
On the other hand, a comparably developed country like Australia is seeing many essential services being privatised, but the weather service rightfully remains a sacred government entity, with a high amount of public trust. http://www.bom.gov.au/app/
> With the BOM Weather app you can check the weather—wherever you are—from Australia's official weather source, the Bureau of Meteorology.
>has a long history of providing public services for the common good, rather than profit oriented motives.
Hahaha. BOM charges extortionate, nonviable prices for <i>everything</i> above the basics. Australia is one of the hardest countries for us to get reliable weather data from.
The trouble with government agencies run on a cost-recovery basis, is they have no incentive to do anything at a cost that will be recoverable.
This seems like a bad outcome for consumers. I don't the context in Germany, but in my opinion: weather information should be a public service available to everyone for free.
Commercial providers can provide alternatives with features that people are willing to pay for. For example: better UI, push notifications when it's about to rain (as Dark Sky does), morning push reminders to take an umbrella if the day is looking rainy, etc.
The flip side is weather forecasting is a rapidly evolving field. R&D into techniques for more accurate forecasts is very expensive, and governments aren't great at that kind of innovation.
If all weather forecast apps were paid for, apps would have revenue to perfect their models, and true competition would exist between them, both in terms of price, but also quality of results.
What nonsense. Weather models are developed by scientists mostly funded by public grants. The models are run on publicly funded supercomputers, and the results are then regurgitated by companies trying to skim a buck off the traffic. The only innovation contributed by the private sector is serving ads and tracking users. The idea that MBA Joe Blo making a weather app is developing state of the art weather models is preposterous.
Put the Brazilian INPE in this list too, it's sad that some people created an imaginary world in their heads where innovation comes only from private companies...
When we're talking about physical sciences most of the work is done by universities and research centers, a lot of them funded by public money.
This makes perfect sense to me if I think how things are in Romania (and I suspect it's the same in Germany too).
The Romanian state entity sells access to their weather data. So any 3rd party would, indeed, be at a severe disadvantage with a free app.
Last I checked they wouldn't even confirm if at least the severe warning notices were available to the public without a license.
So, the thing that's missing here is: where were WetterOnline getting the data from? They clearly were paying for it. I suspect they were getting it from none other than the German Weather Service.
The solution would be, of course, for this dataset to be free. But German Weather Service preferred the courts to find another solution...
Most of the data is free and access costs no money. Some of it is even free across all of Europe due to open governmental data regulations.
Some detailed or highly localised data would probably only be available commercially. But satellite data for example can be downloaded realtime by anyone.
If WetterOnline was paying for their weather data then they didn't get their data from DWD.
The DWD data is completely free. You don't even need a registration or API key or something like that. I just tried and downloaded Radar images. I can't read that format, but I could download it.
The issue is that the legal mandate of DWD is just to provide the data and not to compete with private companies. It probably made sense when those laws where written, but now it is just stupid.
The problem with such a non-compete law is that your public service doesn't really need to change much over time, but a commercial business might figure out a way to make money off of it and suddenly the private side changed forcing the public side to shut down or something like that and now everyone that was building on top of that public stuff gets screwed over. The side-effects are so big, it's hard to capture in a law.
> private side changed forcing the public side to shut down or something
As far as I am aware they are purely funded by Taxes, so I can't imagine any way that these private companies could change to force the public service to close.
Well, say a weather data service is provided by the government but is only allowed to operate as long as they don't compete with a commercial service. At that time there is no commercial service so it's fine.
10 years later a commercial service is started and now the public service has to change because that's what the law says. The public service didn't do anything wrong and didn't change anything, but because something in the private space changed the public space now has to stop providing a service. That's what I meant by change in the weather data example.
This law was written in 2015, so no, it didn't make more sense then. (the concept certainly is older, but while writing the 2015 law it was specifically modified to add this restriction again)
Disturbing to see. We have the same issue in the US as well. Specifically some companies want NOAA/NWS to give their data to private companies who buy licenses and then the public can go to those companies (ex: AccuWeather). To me, weather (current observations or forecasts) is a public safety thing. Whether you're driving in the mountains and need an accurate forecast to make a go/no go decision or if you're a pilot and need to know freezing levels or other items. I've seen other things like aviation charts and terminal plates where private companies don't want the FAA to give it away for free, either (again: public safety - it should be free).
The article is a little bit light on the details. While I don't agree with the situation, the decision is based on the law for the DWD[1]. According to §4 (1) Nr. 3 DWDG, the only public information is for weather warnings. While in reality, most other information is free, providing it for free is not the tax-payed task of the DWD. According to §4 (1) DWDG, it may only provide free information for the public if it's due to their legal obligation.
I mean, this is an understandable argument, but the moral harm of the government broadcasting the weather data they produce anyway for free is not so great (in my opinion) that it should be stopped.
If DWD has an API, I guess somebody should just put up an open source app on F-Droid, and maybe somebody will pay to put it on Play. I don't know about iOS anymore, last time I made an iOS app it was kinda something you would only do if there was money in it.
I agree somewhat with the general argument, but I don't think the courts should be pushing for "peak neoliberalism" at any cost.
That’s preposterous! I presume that the German people have already paid for the German Weather Service, and their app, with their taxes. In general it seems suspect to have companies make money off of repackaging data created with public funds...
Glad the US isn’t the only place with the privatize everything problem? (Please allow me to be hyperbolic.)
Is it fair that public funds are used to destroy one company’s business? That seems like a path to corruption. Imagine in the US if Democrats or Republicans were able to take reprisals against uncooperative businesses once they won power...
> Is it fair that public funds are used to destroy one company’s business?
When it costs basically nothing to do, yes! Turbotax anyone? Should governments be forced to make doing taxes hard just to give companies a chance to make big bucks for doing your taxes? That is nonsense!
"Fair" or not, if there's only one business i.e. a monopoly, then it ought to be socialized. Is it "fair" to profiteer because you're the only provider of something people need?
(This is a very old question - note the vitriol reserved for millers of flour in the Canterbury Tales.)
> Is it "fair" to profiteer because you're the only provider of something people need?
Generally No it shouldn't be socialised. If it isn't a monopoly of efficiency another company should be able to provide a product/service at a lower price. All you are doing it indirectly passing on the cost to the tax payer by subsidising it.
Obviously there are some exceptions to this depending on things like politics of a region (where a resource/service can be monopolised) e.g. rural areas. That is where a cooperative run by the local community might be better.
Why are you talking about profiteering? This was just a business doing it’s thing.
State sponsored enterprise is what happens in autocratic countries. At the whim of the ruler enterprise is expropriated, whenever something is seen as adequately tempting.
You may think some ill-informed voting public is an okay form of autocratic governance because you’d slap a ‘democracy’ label on it, but it would result in widespread expropriation of businesses by government officials who would consequently wield immense power. The economy would collapse because the incentive to outperform would be gone. There would be a brain drain from private enterprise into government bureaucracy. This is the principle reason why socialist and autocratic governments have relatively unproductive economies. When The People’s Republic of China realized this and permitted private ownership and enterprise, their economy took off as people found an incentive to work harder...
>State sponsored enterprise is what happens in autocratic countries. At the whim of the ruler enterprise is expropriated, whenever something is seen as adequately tempting.
Oh boy, you are not gonna like it when you hear about the "military industrial complex".
>The economy would collapse because the incentive to outperform would be gone.
You speak as if huge chunks of our society haven't been socialized with great results. You want to re-privatize the fire department, so they have more incentive to put out fires? Privatize the police force, so they have more incentive to stop crimes? It's not so straightforward as "private enterprise = proper incentive structure" - it's possible to engineer incentive structures with better outcomes than the free market.
I am curious how this would work in the UK. The UK national met service, Met Office, has a free app, but has to show ads (not sure if there is a legal requirement similar to this case). Its biggest competitor is the BBC weather app which is also tax funded and is not allowed to show any ads. Up until a couple of years ago BBC got its data from the Met Office anyway so the two apps were basically showing the same data. However, now the BBC get its weather information from a private weather company. Anti-competition laws and tax-funded organisations is a complicated business!
I wonder if old versions of the app will still work. Assuming the endpoints are not going to change. Also it seems that I can't find the app due to my search region. Can someone provide a link to the app?
You can find the links to their App on DWD Website German version[1] seems like they've already implemented the ban. The warnings are free, but you have to do an in-app purchase of 1.99 to see the forecasts, etc.
Same in the Netherlands: weather forecasts on public radio have since more than ten years been provided by a private company instead of the national weather service.
And I immediately went and bought this DWD app for 2€, even if I get the same sources and visualization from the free Windy app. The DWD app is just better, and has a nice widget.
I mean this should come with a tax break. Since one benefit is gone and now we have to rely on the bullshit service of this incompetent jackass of a company.
This real bullshit – particularly given that the private companies base their forecasts (indirectly) on the observations that national meteorological services such as Deutsche Wetterdienst collect and provide for free as scientific data. These observations are used as the input data for the same Numeric Weather Prediction models that the commercial companies want to make money from.
Neoliberals want to have their cake and eat it. Unfortunately, neoliberalism is currently (over the past couple of decades, with a small stumble in 2008) the dominant ideology within European politics.
I remember an episode of Last Week Tonight from season 6 where in the USA some pricks wanted to do the same on the free app of the respective gov department. And Trump made the hear of that dept one of the founders of (was it??) Weather.com so he can sabotage the app from the inside.
I don't remember the story, it was another brilliant example of how USA is allowing large corporations soil on everything free and wants the sharks to keep biting people's flesh (just like in healthcare, insurance, guns, etc.).
The German legal system to a large degree has the extent and actual interpretation of the written laws determined by case law. I don't know if this is a landmark case, but if it is (which I would assume) then this is very much outlawing this practice.
that is not correct. germany does not use the common law system where case law is binding, but the civil law system where each case is taken on its own merrits against the law as it is written. past cases are only used as advice to help interpret a new case, but judges have the freedom to not follow that advice.
Can't you say that about almost anything.... Is it even right to spend taxpayers' money for running a Health Service, if it can be handled by private companies?
The law about the weather service clearly states that the weather service should provide information about severe weather.
The decision isn't about what would be nice, it was a purely legalistic question whether the law gave authorization for additional free services. Which it clearly doesn't.
This decision wasn't surprising.
Edit: dislike this comment as much as you want. The commentary in legal circles in Germany was exactly this. Nothing beats HN in legal expertise in a foreign country!
The government service is forced to put ads in its free app. WTF?