[GSDI Legal Econ] Label - Cost Recovery vs Funding

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

I believe the term cost recovery should remain and not be replaced by
funding. Cost recovery has a particular meaning in government, particularly
in the Canadian Context (
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pubs_pol/opepubs/TB_H/FeeInfoe.asp;
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/pubs/extern-charg-frais/report-rapport_e.html).,


The term funding would overshadow the particularities of this
governmentality.  Cost recovery is a means for the government  - which has
monopoly control on public data - to reinforce that monopoly at the scale of
a department or division.  In Canada one department creates and maintains a
particular dataset for governance purposes then under the cost recovery
regime sells it to another department that needs it to understand their
governance particularities, of course all under a restrictive use license.
In Canada with its multiple levels of government (Federal; Provincial &
Territorial; Municipal and in my city National Capital Commission) there is
a lot of cost recovery going on between levels of government and between and
within departments or levels.  Particularly since there is no mechanism to
coordinate acquisitions to avoid multiple purchases and to simplify use
licensing regimes.  Therefore a department may in fact be purchasing the
same dataset more than 5 times.

What is most troubling with this cost recovery regime, beyond the fact of
the acquisition & re-acquisition bureaucracy involved in managing dataset
purchases, combined with all that license management, is the fact that the
public just keeps on paying multiple times over for the same non-rivalrous
good.  More troubling is that the civil sector whose job it is in a
democracy to keep government accountable or to study that which the
government and the private sector do not, cannot afford to purchase the data
the government keeps re-selling to itself at the public's expense. Nor can
citizens.

The term funding masks all the context of cost recovery.

Sincerely
Tracey


-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
tlauriau at gmail.com
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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