What a disgrace. The Shakespeare Review was commissioned by the UK Government in 2012 and basically recommended the exact opposite: https://www.gov.uk/governmen

What a disgrace. The Shakespeare Review was commissioned by the UK Government in 2012 and basically recommended the exact opposite: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/shakespeare-review-of-public-sector-information https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/shakespeare-revie... > ...all PSI [public sector information] is derived from and paid for by the citizen and should therefore be considered as being owned by the citizen. It is the therefore the duty of government to make PSI as open as possible to create the maximum value to the nation. > The high-quality core should be enshrined as National Core Reference Data... Within such National Core Reference Data we would also expect to find the connective tissue of place and location, the administrative building blocks of registered legal entities, the details of land and property ownership. > One would be hard-pressed to find any expert who... would advocate the current Trading Fund model (for Companies House, Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey) in today’s world of open data. One would question the current quasi-commercial Trading Fund model, in favour of one which would be responsible for high quality and transparent data production [and] publishing this as open data... It's the same story in Australia with our Tory government. None of them seem to comprehend the very basic economics of open data: they are unwittingly creating a private natural monopoly instead of setting socially optimal prices for a public good (the data). And since the socially optimal price for an infinitely reproducible and non-rivalrous good is usually its marginal cost of production, the price should be set at approximately 0 (i.e. free).