4 ms·

Don't German citizens pay for this information through taxes? Is this different from forbidding citizens from using the police instead of private security compa

• mqus 7y ago
  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.
• smarnach 7y ago
  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.