5 ms·

Are you suggesting the government put their public access API behind a paywall?

by huytersd 3y ago

tonymet 3y ago
[flagged]
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > They should choose a solution that makes the customers pay for accessing the data. They are. The NPS's customers are the American public, and they are paying for the data via taxes (approximately; government finance is more complex than that, and taxes don't really pay for spending that's a model that really is only true when working with commodity and not fiat currency, but, its reasonable enough for this purpose.) What you want isn't for the current customers to pay for the data, but for the consumers of data to be viewed as customers and then charged for the data. but that potentially makes things more expensive for the NPS's customers, for instance, if one of the significant consumers turns out to be other public agencies, who then are paying a direct cost which pays for both the access to the data and the additional costs of billing and account management that a consumer-pays model imposes, and paying the overhead for the payer-side costs associated with payments, as well as the actual amount of the payments, then you end up ultimately with largely the same customers paying, but paying a whole lot of additional overhead.
  - tonymet 3y ago
    The taxpayers are the patrons not the customers.
    - haswell 3y ago
      We are both.
      - tonymet 3y ago
        The taxpayers are the patrons. The API consumers are the customers. When the customers make a lot of API calls or cause security issues, the patrons have to pay.
        haswell 3y ago
        I'd argue that this is an overly restrictive framing of the situation for a few reasons. First, patron is just another word for customer. I understand that you're using it to distinguish between two customer types: 1. The end user (presumably a future park visitor) 2. The intermediary providing an experience to the same end users (who are presumably using the intermediary to plan a future park visit) But this is not a formal distinction, and I think it's necessary to zoom out and look at the players involved and the nature of their relationship with the NPS. Is it not true that "Patrons" are still likely to be the initiators of those API calls? Is it not also true that the "Customers" exist within the same tax system as the "Patrons"? If I go to nps.gov as a "Patron", I'm directly consuming NPS resources. If I access NPS information via a site that provides an alternative experience, I (the future park goer) am still the primary beneficiary of the API call. Let's say I build a project that calls these APIs and my goal is to help people who have accessibility needs find the parks that are most amenable to their situation. Let's say this is a passion project and I'm not doing this to make money. What you're proposing would make such a project non-viable. And I think there's a strong case to be made that the experience described in the last paragraph will consume fewer NPS resources than navigating through NPS page after page to find what I'm looking for. And in the end, if the information helped a park goer find a place to spend their money, this is a net positive for the NPS.
tonymet 3y ago
This data domain doesn’t need a realtime api. They could host CSVs online with some mirrors and save millions of dollars hosting this stuff.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Ah yes, I see now. Yeah makes no sense to offer a REST response for each request. On that note, what would the processing entail? Processing the get request and packaging the entire dataset into a REST object right? Or is it a more complex API that lets you run queries against the dataset? For that matter wouldn’t downloading a CSV also have to be packaged into a REST object?
  - tonymet 3y ago
    the rest API provides parameters for filtering & pagination. all of that is unnecessary. it's a few hundred MB tops . CSV , Bigquery , anything is better than running REST on EC2

Are you suggesting the government put their public access API behind a paywall?

tonymet 3y ago

[flagged]

dragonwriter 3y ago
> They should choose a solution that makes the customers pay for accessing the data. They are. The NPS's customers are the American public, and they are paying for the data via taxes (approximately; government finance is more complex than that, and taxes don't really pay for spending that's a model that really is only true when working with commodity and not fiat currency, but, its reasonable enough for this purpose.) What you want isn't for the current customers to pay for the data, but for the consumers of data to be viewed as customers and then charged for the data. but that potentially makes things more expensive for the NPS's customers, for instance, if one of the significant consumers turns out to be other public agencies, who then are paying a direct cost which pays for both the access to the data and the additional costs of billing and account management that a consumer-pays model imposes, and paying the overhead for the payer-side costs associated with payments, as well as the actual amount of the payments, then you end up ultimately with largely the same customers paying, but paying a whole lot of additional overhead.
- tonymet 3y ago
  The taxpayers are the patrons not the customers.
  - haswell 3y ago
    We are both.
    - tonymet 3y ago
      The taxpayers are the patrons. The API consumers are the customers. When the customers make a lot of API calls or cause security issues, the patrons have to pay.
      - haswell 3y ago
        I'd argue that this is an overly restrictive framing of the situation for a few reasons. First, patron is just another word for customer. I understand that you're using it to distinguish between two customer types: 1. The end user (presumably a future park visitor) 2. The intermediary providing an experience to the same end users (who are presumably using the intermediary to plan a future park visit) But this is not a formal distinction, and I think it's necessary to zoom out and look at the players involved and the nature of their relationship with the NPS. Is it not true that "Patrons" are still likely to be the initiators of those API calls? Is it not also true that the "Customers" exist within the same tax system as the "Patrons"? If I go to nps.gov as a "Patron", I'm directly consuming NPS resources. If I access NPS information via a site that provides an alternative experience, I (the future park goer) am still the primary beneficiary of the API call. Let's say I build a project that calls these APIs and my goal is to help people who have accessibility needs find the parks that are most amenable to their situation. Let's say this is a passion project and I'm not doing this to make money. What you're proposing would make such a project non-viable. And I think there's a strong case to be made that the experience described in the last paragraph will consume fewer NPS resources than navigating through NPS page after page to find what I'm looking for. And in the end, if the information helped a park goer find a place to spend their money, this is a net positive for the NPS.

tonymet 3y ago

This data domain doesn’t need a realtime api. They could host CSVs online with some mirrors and save millions of dollars hosting this stuff.

huytersd 3y ago
Ah yes, I see now. Yeah makes no sense to offer a REST response for each request. On that note, what would the processing entail? Processing the get request and packaging the entire dataset into a REST object right? Or is it a more complex API that lets you run queries against the dataset? For that matter wouldn’t downloading a CSV also have to be packaged into a REST object?
- tonymet 3y ago
  the rest API provides parameters for filtering & pagination. all of that is unnecessary. it's a few hundred MB tops . CSV , Bigquery , anything is better than running REST on EC2