Why Isn't Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned by the Public?

• openaddresses

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  A global repository of open address, building, and parcel data.

  

It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.

The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.

There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.

The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.

Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.

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The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...

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