I will be the first person to admit I do not greatly enjoy driving a car and trying to map read at the same time. I am one of those folk who get on a lot better in a strange place when I have a passenger with the intelligence to give me decent directions. So one of the great boons of technology for a chap like me has been the developing use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation technology.
I have just returned from a terrific holiday in the USA. During the first week – staying at the northern California home of long-time pal and libertarian blogger Russell Whitaker – I rented a nice big saloon complete with GPS. It was a Magellan device and in my opinion, worth every cent. You can choose from a menu of different languages and the machine either enables you to take the fastest route home, or the most scenic, as well as pinpointing interesting places to visit. On balance I estimate I saved several hours that would have been otherwise spent trying to use a map. On only about three occasions did I get lost. In one case the GPS was wrong footed by a roadwork, and in another by a bad traffic jam. (And er, human error is not removed by GPS). But on the whole, my message to anyone who wants to avoid getting lost is to get GPS.
GPS is now widely used, not just by motorists but also by hikers, bikers, yachtsmen and powerboat users, as well as by the armed forces. GPS started out as part of the US Defence Dept’s satellite system to make it easier for America’s military to identify and hit targets. This point will of course be mentioned by those who want to argue that GPS would never exist without Big Government backing. However, given that launch costs can be radically reduced if only we let that happen – as suggested by the CATO Institute, it seems to me implausible to argue that a system like GPS can only get under way in the State sector. It strikes me as entirely plausible to imagine a rich businessman like Bill Gates, say, launching a few satellites and creating a luxury product of GPS that could eventually drop radically in price while also extending its range. GPS, like other breakthrough technologies, could have started as a high-end luxury good and gradually expand in scope and fall in cost like pocket calculators, DVD machines or jet travel.
There are also civil liberties issues to do with the government use of GPS, and I recommend that it is probably not a good idea for users to programme their individual street address into rented GPS machines if they can avoid it. And also do not imagine that this technology renders older methods redundant. For example, any yachtsman who puts to sea without the right charts, compasses and knowledge of navigation is asking for trouble. Oh, and remember that handheld GPS machines run on batteries, which run out.
Okay, anyone want to buy me a machine for Christmas?
But if everyone knows where they’re going, will anyone stumble on the road less travelled?
I have my doubts about the economic feasibility of GPS. It involves an enormous number of sattelites (24 ?), which have to be maintained – i.e. renewed every now and then (8 years ?). Even if you consider all civilian uses toghether the price of using GPS for each user would be big, and for most uses (hiking, sea navigation, traveling) there are the old, cheap, (map reading) solutions.
So I doubt the GPS would have such a big users base if the users had to pay for those sattelites. At present they are free-riding on the military system. There is a lot of demand for free goods.
If people started putting their gps co-ordinates on their address instead/along with their post/zip code then life would be much simpler.
Mind you, fuckwits would still give out the wrong number.
I once had to go to ‘ The Crown, Anlaby Road’. Anlaby road is about 20 miles long, and ‘The Crown’ was newly named, so newly named that the nameplate hadn’t been put up yet. Such fun.
Get a Navman PiN handheld GPS pocket pc, then you won’t get lost even when you’re walking.
Here in Massachusetts, US, the governer just revealed an new plan to use GPS to keep track of those considered dangerous sex offenders that are finished serving time. It has already been implemetented in at least one other state I believe.
An advantage of GPS over other location systems eg: mobile phone based is: GPS is “passive”, it needs only to recieve, not transmit. A GPS unit reveals your position to you, but not to others.
Whenever anyone tells me something wouldn’t have been done but for government efforts, I remember where the money for the feat comes from: individuals. All the government has to contribute is lethal force to amass resources and keep people working toward a particular goal. So, to maintain government is necessary, one must allege that government is better at picking goals than individuals or voluntary associations of individuals. Does anyone actually believe this?
Of course GPS (also called Navstar) is a military system that has proven itself over and over. The US decided that it is also a ‘Global Good’ so they now have a policy of maiking all the current GPS signals available to the public.
Over the years I’ve written a lot about the system. One point that gets overlooked is that the timing signal is in many ways more impotant than the navigation signal. Its used to keep things like cell phones and Electronic funds transfer operating.
The EU is planning to build a rival called Gallileo, you can check out the piece I did on thespacereview.com called “What’s the frequency Jaques?”
1) How would you propose to run a billing system for your hypothetical private GPS system without government intervention?
2) Does anybody here remember iridium, the private worldwide satellite mobile phone system?
You really want your GPS-like system running a Windows OS? I just know I would want to see a blue screen of death when I am lost.
GPS is nifty but like meteorology,time broadcasts or public cartography it is not something the free-market can operate. GPS will not be privatized anytime soon because the GPS signal cannot be converted to property.
It is technologically impossible at present to create a system that only subscribers could use therefor free riders would eat the system alive. Encryption will not work in a one-to-many system like GPS. Multi-band GPS would be inaccurate and inefficient and there is not enough bandwidth to serve millions of users in any case.
A GPS signal is information and it is very hard to propertize information. Without property rights to a resource, the free-market cannot manage that resource.
” How would you propose to run a billing system for your hypothetical private GPS system without government intervention?”
“GPS will not be privatized anytime soon because the GPS signal cannot be converted to property.”
That maybe isn’t so difficult: every producer of any GPS receiver will be forced to pay a license fee ($100 ??) just like any producer of a PC pays 100 bucks to Bill, for each box. There will be pirates, just like there are Windows pirates, still Bill Gates can’t complain.
This does not mean that the economics in both cases are similar, or that a private GPS would be feasible.
But Uncle Sam is extremely generous with taxpayers money. It should have charged some fee off all users of GPS worldwide, to cover some of the system’s maintenance expenses.
I would have no problem with a small subscription fee to help offset the maintenance/replacement cost of the satelites. A centrally massed chunk of resources, i.e. government may have been the creator of the technology, but that is not to say that a private enterprise system could ro would not have done so. Building massive communication networks is transmission of information, just like GPS, yet cell phone and other communication companies have no problem profiting from it or “propertizing” the airwaves.
Granted the demand for GPS might be less if the cost was greater, but a private industry that was contracted for military reasons, even in a case of the military itself being a privately contracted entity, would certainly have the resources necessary to develop the technology, and the maintenance would be easily covered by a small subscription or usage fee.
Also bear in mind that much of the cartography that has gone into the “cheap way” of finding directions, as in map reading, was also done on the taxpayer’s dime. Hardly a day goes by that I dont see government paid surveyors checking some road or elevation or bulding site. Government runs the highway systems in this country as well, including the adding of new roads into mapping databases. IF that cost were also passed on, GPS would not be so expensive by comparison, in fact it may be a less expensive solution, since a large company, such as one capable of creating a GPS system would only really need to pay a single liscense fee for access to the mapping databases.
Yes, and look what happened there. Motorola bet a sizable chunk of their future on a system that would wipe the floor with the European upstart GSM… Oops.
I *had* been looking forwards to the resulting fireworks show; I felt quite cheated that the US military “purchased” it.
1) Who knows what advances would have been made, GPS or something other, if the resources were left in private hands. Government intervention does have benefits, but it also has costs. Those who point at a toy and smugly say you wouldn’t have it if it weren’t an ancillary gain of government intervention only are including half the equation. They never include the cost and that which was never created.
2) It’s a bit disconcerting having such technologies. They’re fun, and sometimes helpful. Will it be long, after ID cards are mandated, that they will contain a chip broadcasting your whereabouts? You don’t have anything to worry about if you’re not doing anything illegal, right? A previous commentator said such location technologies are already being used against those who run afoul of the State. As always, we have to be wary of anything that eliminates individual privacy, from cameras and ID cards to radio frequency.
3) Shannon Love brings up good points, and dovetails with a notion of mine regarding technology and the State. Government interference creates new technologies that may not have been created in a free market and have amorphous property traits in the traditional sense. When new ‘markets’ are sprung from the womb of State, individual property rights erode. The new technology is non-segregatable, and even if it is, there is always the fall back as to how can new technology owe its existence to collective investment, but be left to free-market distribution? Does having it merely move to public domain suffice? It would seem to benefit those already ‘blessed’ with capital versus those who don’t.
The notion still remains that the State only begets more State, one way or another.
How do they manage it for digital TV?
Originally, GPS producers were going to be requird to pay a licence fee. But then the USSR said they wouldn’t charge a licence fee for GLONASS, so the U.S. had to either drop their licence fee or face the possibility that the (more accurate) Soviet system would become the dominant one. Market forces at work, sort of. (That’s also one reason the U.S. dropped Selective Availability.)
Although the GPS system has a lot of satellites (last time I checked there were 27), it only has that many satellites so that it can cover the entire globe and have some redundancy. If, as Perry suggested, GPS started as a private venture it could have been confined to the continental U.S., or Europe, and been built with as few as four satellites, then expanded as market forces dictated.
This person has obviously never watched TV in the U.S.
Andy Wood,
“How do they manage it for digital TV?”
They use encryption for satellite TV, but the problems while very similar are sufficiently different in scale to cause serious problems with the economics of a private GPS system.
(1) A GPS system will generate one signal for use world wide. The encryption will have to fixed for fairly long terms so that the units can be widely deployed. Such encryption on one signal with a known output will be easy to break or copy compared to a satellite TV system.
(2) The consequences of accidentally disrupting someone’s GPS because they may not have paid could be fatal. The system will have to err on the side of letting people have access thus making piracy even easier.
(3) The market for pirates will be world wide and not localized by language and culture like TV is.
A satellite system is hugely expensive up front and the payoff long term. I wouldn’t risk any of my capital on a system were I could presume that only a small minority of uses would actually pay for it.
The free-market only operates in environments of strong property rights. Weak property rights, weak free-market.
Actually, Giles, for those that own “dual-purpose” motorcycles, like myself, it makes taking the “less travelled” roads much more tempting. I could wander off on a gravel road in the middle of corn fields and still have some certainty that I could find my way back to a higway or other route home. I would imagine that similar situations/conditions exist in the world of 4-wheeled vehicles.
I’m thinking that my father would rather I had GPS. I decided over the past month to take back roads (state highways instead of interstates) on my motorcycle to and from Chicago, IL, US from my house in Iowa, US. I had already checked the routes with an atlas, and scribbled directions, but needed refreshers along the way to verify where I was and that I hadn’t missed a turn somewhere along the way. Luckily, a short call on my cell phone to my broadband-equipped father got me the directions I needed.
He seemed happy enough to assist, but by the third time I called, you could tell that he was considering sending me towards an unfinished bridge over a major body of water.
Toolkien makes the key points in this type of situation. There are so many aspects of technology and medicine that have a strong governmental basis simply because the government was extremely activist in the last 2/3 of the 20th century. Given the series of events, i.e., the depression of the 30’s, WW2, and the cold war, there is some justification for it, although much of it is offensive to those, such as myself, who prefer a limited state.
If you have ever seen one of those computer generated models of the universe, showing the effects of black holes and other “gravity wells”, the whole image of curved space as described by Einstien, you have a ready made model for what happens when the state, esp. one with the access to enormous resources such as the US has, decides to enter some area of scientific research.
The state intervention curves the “space” around the science in question, drawing mental, educational, and cultural resources to it, and changing the path of any independent actor (researcher) who comes near, like a comet passing near Jupiter or the sun.
This is clearly the case in medicine and education. There was a fantastic graph I saw a few years ago that tracked medical costs from the turn of the 20th century through the 1990’s, along with the general cost of living. Right after the Medicare/Medicaid programs were put in place, the medical cost suddenly accelerated in comparison to the general cost of living.
And there is no doubt that the educational system in the US started rotating into the heart of a black hole beginning about the time it was taken over by the Federal governments’ mandates and funding.
The hardest argument for those with libertarian viewpoints to make to the average citizen is getting them to step back and try to think of how things might have been if the state had not seized trillions of dollars of productive value to use for state purposes, regardless of whether any specific element was valuable or not.
What matters is the distortions in the cultural or societal space time continuum in which we have to live. Relationships between humans become warped, which is as good a definition of statism as I can think of, I guess.
All this is frighteningly reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s example in Atlas Shrugged of “the state science institute”. We can only theorize where we might have been, but I can pretty confidently state that we would have been much farther along, far better off, and things would be far less expensive. The things that seem difficult to convert into private industry I can assure would either not be even necessary in a free market, or the logistics needed to convert them would be readily available. This would especially be the case in something as simple as encryption. Private industry has already shown it can stay ahead of government development of software, including security software. The only reason it is not farther along is that the gov. is indeed so heavily involved in that field as it is, forming one of those “black holes” that Mr. Retired so poiniantly refers to.
Digital terrestrial television has several revenue streams – the BBC get the licence fee, natch; the other broadcasters have advertising which generates revenue for them.
Digital satellite television is subject to the usual gamut of encryption methods, and purchase of decryption rights (smartcards) is a more direct way for the broadcasters to earn money. You still get the advertising, however… This is all about to get a little more interesting with the introduction of various DRM systems.
I guess the short answer is – GPS signals don’t try to entice you into buying a Power Rangers suit at the same time as telling you where you are.
“GPS signals don’t try to entice you into buying a Power Rangers suit at the same time as telling you where you are.”
Why not ? They could. It’s just that the current model owned by the state and financed by tax money decided not to seek revenue, being content with it’s inexhaustible and independent source of income (taxes).
Whereas we seem amazed by the concept of “GPS” – the fact is that the GPS system is very dated indeed (1970’s technology) and a far, far better system is currently undergoing commercial testing in the UK.
In the early 1990’s, during the puberty of mobile communications, Securicor claimed that they could track any mobile handset to with 2 metres, by simple triangulation of the 3 adjacent cells. We now live in an age where the average cell count used by modern digital telephones is 8 for reception and another 8 for transmission. Just leaving the telephone attached to the car’s navigation system would be enough to track the car’s exact position down to millimetric positioning. This would certainly bring down the cost of these units (BMW just quoted me £1695 for a DVD/CD/TV/GPS unit in an X5, as an optional extra), although I am quite happy with my Tomtom Navigator 2 and Fortuna bluetooth GPS unit attached to an XDA2 – it even tells me where the speed cameras are now.
Not only that, but I havent noticed too many ads on my cell phone either. And there are a multitude of commercial free channels on satelite radio, and thats significantly less than the average cell phone, yet it requires satelites and so forth to function. I dont think there is really that great a hurdle turning something like GPs into a profit stream. Consider the monies coming from car manufacturers that build their cars with OnStar or some other nav system. Most of them are either paying for the priviledge, or they could be, without causing that much disruption to the current flow.
ThePresentOccupier,
You’ve misread my question. It was not “How does TV raise revenue?” – I already know the answer to that – but “If it is possible to make digital TV available only to subscribers, using encryption, why isn’t it also possible for GPS?”, in response to Shannon’s claim that it would be impossible. He’s given a reasonable enough answer.
Shannon:
But if the problem is simply that the system works at small scales of about the size of a country, but not large scales for the whole world, couldn’t that be solved by using different encryption keys for each country? Then, if the pirates successfully break the encryption for France, the encryption for England is still secure.
Sorry, Gates already blew a couple hundred million on Satphones that didn’t get off the ground, so I doubt he would be ready to jump in on another project.
Seriously, it is not just the lifetime of the sats, or the years involved in design/development, it is the business model. How does the sat owner generate revenue? If you charge per use, fewer folks will use them. If you set rates too high, pirate techniques will appear almost at once.
GPS work because it is free.
Note: early receivers for the Mil cost $30K, consumer receivers are now $100 or so.
And also:
But presumably the consequences of losing a GPS signal because your batteries have gone flat could be fatal too. If it’s the user’s responsibility to ensure that he has enough batteries, surely it’s no big deal to make it his responsibility to make sure he has an up-to-date smart card, or whatever?
“Seriously, it is not just the lifetime of the sats, or the years involved in design/development, it is the business model. How does the sat owner generate revenue?”
There are communication satellite systems out in space already, privately, commercially owned and financed, under a viable economic model. Maybe a GPS function could be added to them, making them multipurpose ?
Hi,
Does anyone remember Geostar? It was a venture by space pioneer Gerald O’Neill back in the 80’s. It was a commercial satellite navigation system based on conventional geostationary comsats. Was supposed to be used for aircraft navigation. GPS made it redundent and it went bankrupt in 1991. Had there been no state funded system to compete against it could have verywell evolved into what GPS is today for civilians
ta
Ralph
“(1) A GPS system will generate one signal for use world wide. The encryption will have to fixed for fairly long terms so that the units can be widely deployed. ”
Sez who? Surely changing encryptions, with updates for the units, would provide an opportunity for the provider to collect money. Every six months, say, you have to buy an update or your unit will cease to understand the satellite signals after the encryption switches.
“Such encryption on one signal with a known output will be easy to break or copy compared to a satellite TV system. ”
I don’t recall having everyone get new satellite TV receivers every six months. And they seem to be widely deployed, and they listen to satellites. And yet they have a profitable subscription model.
Just some quick notes.
1. I can’t believe people are debating whether or not you can encrypt GPS signals. Why can’t I believe this? Because GPS signals *were* encrypted until May 2000, using a system called “Selective Availability”. This story details the situation, as well as some other interesting uses for GPS.
2. I also can’t believe no one has described the means by which GPS works. First off, it’s cool, second off, it describes fairly well why private enterprise has a bit of an issue getting a GPS system off of the ground. GPS works by having a constellation of 29 satellites orbiting the Earth, each of which carries with it an atomic clock. To gain your position with a GPS receiver, the receiver locks onto the signals from at least 3 satellites (for 2 dimensional location) or 4 satellites (for 3 dimensional location). Once it has started receiving signals, the receiver gains several bits of important information. The first is the location of the various satellites in the constellation. There are always a minimum of 24, currently there are 29. The second is the exact time of the universe as determined by the floating atomic clock on board the GPS satellite in question. The receiver knows that it exists somewhere on a theoretical sphere with the satellite (whose precise location in space is known and broadcasted with every signal) as the center, and thus using 3-4 satellites can estimate its location through triangulation. The receiver uses the atomic clocks to estimate how far away it is from the satellites. That is to say, the speed of light presents a lag, and by comparing the signals of multiple satellites along with the knowledge of their precise location a GPS receiver can work out the lags and triangulate to within 1-3 meters. Pretty neat stuff.
That said, I just don’t see how private industry would have ever felt the need to come up with something like that. How many times is private industry stuck in the mountains of Afghanistan in hostile territory, with no means of communicating via standard radio, needing to know a location precise to within 1-3 meters? Moreover, how far do you trust anybody to launch atomic clocks into space, let alone 29+ of them? I’m sorry. I’m usually against big-government stuff, but it seems to me that these types of projects are what government is there to do. Also – a note to the author:
Jet travel? Jets were invented for the military (of Nazi Germany), their development furthered largely by the governments of the US and the USSR, and only put into commercial production after the Air Force allowed Boeing to do so, with the 707. Perry should know this – one of the first jets was a military jet – the De Havilland Vampire. The militaries of the states drove the development of jet engines. I’m pretty sure aircraft were able to continue being developed past the Wright’s “proof-of-concept” because the Army took an interest in them.
All things considered, sometimes the government does things private industry would have no motivation (nor resource) to do. The government blazed the way towards global Earth surveying through satellite imagery with the Landsat program. Private industry has come up with other orbiting surveying platforms since then. Those, of course, don’t carry atomic clocks like GPS, but it’s an example of somewhere where the research wouldn’t have been done without the government, but since then, private industry has begun to take over. Perhaps what is needed is a private research foundation contributed to by many, many private companies which exists to fund such world-changing endeavours such as rocket flight (government), jet flight (government), flight (government), space travel (government), annual flu shot production (government), funding much research into any number of things (state governments here and abroad)… etc., etc…
Anyway, I’m rambling.
Catch you all later. Love the blog, read often, post infrequently. The GPS thing caught my eye because of my industrial background in related technologies.
Jonathan
Actually, we weren’t debating that. What we were debating was whether it was possible to restrict the decryption equipment to paying subscribers. The encrypted GPS signals were, as far as I know, only available to the military, so that doesn’t really answer the question.
Jonathan,
The military may well have been the initial market for certain technologies. I do not propose that there be no military, I do propose that technological advances be done in the private market, including those done for large customers, i.e. the military. This would be more efficient, and would still end up with similar technological advancements trickling out to the rest of society. Government need not be involved in science.
My parents are geocachers, using the geocaching website to find little treasure troves that other people hide. I think that counts as finding “the road less traveled”; many of these caches are designed to point out something new and interesting to the finder. (My parents designed one around a new mural wall in their neighborhood – the coordinates are found by answering questions about the mural, which causes people to actually look at it closely rather than just a quick glimpse with, “Oh, that’s nice.”)
Your position would be quite correct. The GPS system had a private sector competitor that was in many technical ways quite superior, it was certainly vastly cheaper. It was called Geostar, Dale Amon or Rand Simberg may fill you in on particulars.
It succumbed to its “free” competition, among other things. It was superior enough that, absent a few bits of bad luck it would have been in operation for nearly twenty years by now.
“Yachtsman”? Listen: there is a whole generation of private pilots coming online, who will get through their certificate checkrides with the old clock-to-map-to-ground dead reckoning techniques, but probably won’t make it to their first biennial flight review before they surrender all that to a GPS unit.
This is not good. Flight planning and operational navigation are, of course, perishable skills. When you don’t look at the wind side of your E6-B (slide-rule type flight computer) for a while, you’re slipping into that place where your hair is eventually going to stand up at realizing the scope of matters when the digital bits disappear and events are pressing in the air.
I’m convinced that GPS units are cute toys in a GA cockpit: entertaining guests, but they don’t make the team.
“This is not good. Flight planning and operational navigation are, of course, perishable skills. When you don’t look at the wind side of your E6-B (slide-rule type flight computer) for a while, you’re slipping into that place where your hair is eventually going to stand up at realizing the scope of matters when the digital bits disappear and events are pressing in the air.”
And it’s this attitude that helps keep the sky nearly empty.
It’s a travesty that after a hundred years the overwhelming majority of the population is still using groundcars. Those damn things should have been in the museum 20 years ago.
We shouldn’t be striving to keep out automation in order to get pilots to keep up their skills; what we want is for ordinary people to be able to fly craft that don’t require unusually dedicated pilots undergoing expensive training in order to operate safely. We want average people to be able to fly routinely, the way they operate the primitive four-wheeled vehicles today.