SMHI is the worst offender in Sweden regarding selling information people do not want

In the US (and many other places in the world) there is a discussion on whether people and organisations should be able to access more of the data for free that they already have paid for. A little bit naive statement of course, but the overall discussion is what rights a de-facto monopoly in the form of an agency can have regarding the raw data they have.

In Sweden we have a few of those. SMHI that keeps track of the weather in Sweden. Another is Lantmäteriverket that keep track of maps.

Neither of these make the base data they use for their creation of products available. In the US there is a discussion on whether that data should be available for free. In many cases the data is already available for free, and that has lead to a competition between for example people that make weather reports and maps.

But not in Sweden.

SMHI as for years refused to give data to web sites that want to include weather. Like newspapers etc. Instead they require a server side include or similar that can link to a specific corner of the website of SMHI. So if the site of SMHI goes down (which happens now and then) the website that include the weather is blamed for it. There is no way the owner of the website can take responsibility for response time, uptime etc as the weather is fetched by the client from the SMHI website.

There are many more extremely broken things with SMHI operations. For example that they very soon will stop delivering this data in other formats than Adobe Flash. Have you ever heard anything as stupid in your life?

A governmentally controlled agency, that is the only one that have a certain kind of data (the weather reports from the thousands of weather stations in Sweden), refuse to give their data away, and on top of that force all people in Sweden to use a commercial product from a US company to access the data?

In the last millenium, when I was responsible for inclusion of data on Everyday.Com from agencies like SMHI, all of them (except SMHI of course) agreed to send the data via PGP-signed email. Including news agencies like TT.

I am so tired of how SMHI and Lantmäteriverket behaves.

They must be controlled, by extremely strong regulation obviously. Killed. The data must be freed. They can continue to create maps and weather reports, but must compete on equal terms with other commercial companies on the market.

Previously I had the view that the migration to a competitive market must be done slowly so SMHI and Lantmäteriverket could change their organisations and business cases slowly. Split their budget in the collection and gathering process and the value added services. And then stop cross subsidising the collection process from the sale of their products. But I now give up. They show absolutely no interest in doing the right thing.

My recommendation to the government is to, already in the budget that is written as I type this: Do change the way SMHI and Lantmäteriverket behave on the market, NOW!