" That's the analogy that you seem to have completely missed - the government should act like Costco, making their data available in bulk, but instead, they act

" That's the analogy that you seem to have completely missed - the government should act like Costco, making their data available in bulk, but instead, they act like bodegas, giving little snippets." Is that really the problem? If that is the problem, one can easily write an app that gathers a lot of these little snippets and assembles them in any way one wants. In fact that would be easier, than writing a bunch of articles and trying to change how the government does things. Or is the problem that the government wants to provide data to the target user directly and somebody else wants to be the middle man. "You act as if accessible data standards aren't a part of what the open government movement is lobbying for." That article did not mention anything about accessible data standards. It also did not mention the "open government movement" at all. Hey if there is something called an "open government movement" and it wants accessible data standards more power to them (especially if "accessible" means open and not "accessible for a fee"). But again, I don't know why this is relevant as neither was mentioned by the article. "Why, exactly, do you think someone who wants data to be more commonly available would stop and be happy if it were only made available in some obscure proprietary format?" Well, here is an example, that someone might not want data to be more commonly available to everyone, they might want data to be more commonly available to them and not to everyone else so that they can insert themselves as a middle man between the data provider (government) and the data consumer. This is the only way the Costco analogy of the original article actually makes sense. "The article specifically says that we're talking about priorities, that the warehouse needs to come first." Yes of course the warehouse needs to come first. And then, if you are good middleman and know how to deal with government you can ensure that nothing of much importance comes later. I don't know, maybe I am cynical. Maybe these guys really care for transparency and want government to start releasing data in bulk so that as much data as possible gets released as cheaply as possible. So maybe I am wrong. Then again maybe not. If you wanted open government above all you would not mind much about exactly what format the data came in. And the fact that you just flamed me and accused me of trolling out of the blue, makes me even more doubtful the motives of the original article's drafter are honest.