openpolitics.com

A British startup is assigning a unique name to every meter of Earth’s surface. Should addressing systems be universalized—and privatized?

.. Its address doesn’t just tell [you] where it is, but also what road to take to get to the front gate

.. What3Words envisions a universal addressing system, functional in any language, that refers to locations more precisely than street addresses can.

.. its leaders split Earth’s complete land and ocean surface area to 57 trillion three-by-three meter squares. Every individual grid square has a distinctive name, expressed as three words

.. there is no free or open database of how every What3Words address lines up with a GPS coordinate. In fact, charging for access to that database is exactly how the startup What3Words makes money.

.. Mongolia is the least densely populated sovereign nation on the planet.

.. “There’s really no addresses at all for most of the country,” Sheldrick told me.

.. What3Words will provide a national addressing system for Mongolia

.. In the early 2000s, the federal government and other organizations began using these IDs, called DUNS numbers, to organize companies that wanted to bid for contracts.

.. The U.S. government has paid Dun & Bradstreet millions to use the DUNS system.

 .. At first, mail was addressed to rural customers only by their name, city, and state. Local postmasters memorized the rest.

.. “It’s only within the last decade that every house has a street address,” says Nancy Pope, a historian at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. “You end up with these street addresses that are in the tens of thousands, because they’re on a rural road tens of miles from the nearest town.”

.. What3Words addresses are designed to fail catastrophically, and therefore noticeably, Sheldrick told me. A single misplaced letter will never send a package 10 miles in the wrong direction, as a reversed digit in a latitude-longitude coordinate might. Instead, it will send it to another continent.

.. Once inside the ecosystem, its ownership could start extracting rents.

 .. But it doesn’t matter if users personally trust Sheldrick or the What3Words team. Intellectual property rights can easily change hands, and they always outlive their owners and their owners’ good intentions.

..

This means, for example, that a town is barred by law from releasing a dataset describing when garbage will get picked up where.

The British government is now spending £5 million to rebuild an open version of the exact same postcode registry that it sold off three years ago.