I normally shy away from fearful "what if" scenarios, but this time, I could not resist. This post in short: On the one hand, vehicle monitoring for government toll collection is vehemently opposed. On the other hand, people are enthusiastically picking up Google's free turn-by-turn navigation, which just happens to be online and GPS-based all the time. Anyone see a connection?

About a year ago, an old colleague visited us to apply for a "Semantic Databases" professorship at the CIT-EC. One of the things he talked about was the enormous amounts of money that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are pouring into both database research and database build-up. His implication was that, over time, the sheer amount of rich data in those databases would make them so much more competetive over anybody who doesn't have that kind of data collected, that they could basically crush any competition.

Fast forward to now, and Tim O'Reilly blogs about "The War for the Web", with quite different words and a much less technical bent, but essentially pointing out first steps in this direction: Powerful platforms flexing their muscle by restricting what you can and cannot link to, easily.

Coming back to Google's free turn-by-turn navigation: Navigation data is expensive to acquire and maintain -- you have to drive around all the streets, in regular intervals, to pick up all the road changes and measure exact positions. OK, maybe TomTom and the likes are charging quite a bit more than it costs, but it certainly ain't free. So how come that Google can afford to give it away?.

One possibility would be royalties from phone manufacturers but given that Google Maps for Mobile is free, it doesn't seem likely. Another option would be that it is promotion for Android. Pretty costly promotion, then.

However, everybody using that service essentially announces his/her location to Google, with GPS accuracy, which is usually in the 5-10m range. This seems to be the only thing that Google gets from it and it could be very useful information to have about people. I bet many people would pay handsomely for it, or for services based on it.

I really don't know, but either they have some pretty novel plan up their sleeves to drive their business or otherwise I'm starting to get worried.