> In the worst offenders, you have UK, where Royal Mail charges you for postcode data Actually, the UK is kind of a funny situation. A number of years ago the

> In the worst offenders, you have UK, where Royal Mail charges you for postcode data Actually, the UK is kind of a funny situation. A number of years ago the Ordnance Survey began publishing postcode data under a free (CC) licence. Royal Mail wasn't too happy, but as Royal Mail's APIs were a bit simpler and more direct (OS service was SPARQL-only) so I guess they didn't feel threatened enough to change their pricing. I worked for a company that had an account with Royal Mail at the time and I was tasked with parsing OS data. That's many years ago and now that I revisit the OS offerings have changed. They appear to have relicensed, and split their offerings between a free db[0] without full addresses and a commercial db[1] with full addresses. Either way, Royal Mail may have the established customer base but I wouldn't look to them exclusively to see who's "leading the way" in this space in the UK. [0] https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/open-map-names https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/op... [1] https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/addressbase https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/ad...