Don't forget that private companies like Google very often create value not by collecting data as such, but by crawling through 50 different US state datasets a

Don't forget that private companies like Google very often create value not by collecting data as such, but by crawling through 50 different US state datasets and untold thousands of county/town datasets to figure out property lines, ZIP code maps, address numbers, etc. There's a symbiotic relationship here, much like research in the natural sciences: basic research and basic data collection is a public good, but there's plenty of value to be added by private industry. It's a win-win as long as the people at large are able to recapture some of the value created by private industry (rather than it being concentrated in the hands of a few stakeholders).