The brewing issue of China’s regulation of online mapping sites has me thinking about the benefits that these platforms provide beyond simply local search. If you haven’t heard already, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has started regulating online mapping sites in that country, and vows to shut down mapping sites if they aren’t approved and licensed.
China has reported that there are more than 42,000 online mapping sites, and justifies this level of oversight by citing social harm due to misinformation, as well as state security concerns. Most of the news media is focused on the Google story, because Google has yet to be accepted, and many are pegging it as a snub based on their recent confrontation with Chinese censors. But Microsoft and Nokia are also waiting on notification of whether they’ve made the list.
While control is the primary goal of the government, at stake is the revenue from online mapping, which has increased to $72 million within China according to Analysys International. There’s also the local search market in China, which has reached as much as $330 million per year for Google alone. With a full third of Google searches involving location, according to Google spokesperson Ed Parsons, the hit that company could take is quite sizable. While local search clearly drives the business model of online mapping, what are some of the other less-tangible benefits to the people of China?
Diminished World View
A common global mapping platform, with aerial and street-view imagery that give a detailed understanding of place, provides a wonderful cross-cultural window onto the world. A solely country-specific map site, that loses great levels of map details at the borders, will impinge upon the citizens view of the world. While globalization has made China a focal point of manufacturing, with exports across the globe, the inward world view will impact the country’s ability to understand their global markets.
The Chinese government has always regulated online mapping, and the Internet in general with the government’s claims of “Internet sovereignty.” The tight control of companies and information online seems to be a losing battle in light of dramatic shifts to the opposite spectrum with governments elsewhere moving to more open data access and distribution.
A Necessary Mobile Component
Mapping is definitely a necessity for mobility. Of the current services that Google China provides, it is mobile mapping and not search that is their dominant application according to China Polling. Mobile location services provide a means to monetize online mapping while also building stronger communities by sharing experiences in context.
The ability to access maps and location services is of growing interest everywhere, and current location-based services platforms work broadly across the world. While China-centric applications can certainly be developed, there will likely be some difficulties in porting functionality between versions, and likely no easy means to share experiences with the same application if visiting China. This closed approach could certainly keep China behind the world in terms of the quality and quantity of location-based mobile applications.
Quality Content
While the government asserts that the benefits of a closed and regulated system provide greater quality assurance, the opposite approach is being taken by many other map providers. The Chinese government is stuck in the services to the people mode of dictating and delivering what they feel is best, while others in the world see the benefits of opening up their map data in a way that citizens build their own applications, and help improve the quality of the data by opening up two-way communication about the data accuracy.
The world is seeing the benefits of cadres of map makers that improve the quality of the data through use. With China’s close regulation on online map providers, it’s hard to believe that they would make the change toward enabling their citizens to manipulate the data and create custom applications. In the figure of 42,000 map-based websites, one wonders how many of those are what we’ve come to term as mash-ups, where applications make use of the underlying map data to deliver a customized application upon the map. If western countries were to take that same view, and count every mash-up site built upon any map platform (including freely available government data) that number would certainly run into the millions.
Quality control in this instance is much more about control than about quality. Without the means to be able to post data back, or build applications upon the base layers of map data, the Chinese users will simply have antiquated, and marginally useful map platforms.
The way that the Internet is constantly evolving provides daily changes that have huge implications for the world economy. Increasingly, access to the Internet is seen as a right, and in fact Finland declared it as such this week via law. Life without Internet at reasonable broadband speeds is severely restrictive, with implications on personal productivity and livelihood.
One can understand that China’s leaders are having a hard time relinquishing control, but the open Internet, and open mapping platforms, have a momentum that will be increasingly impossible to suppress. The breaking point for policies like this won’t come from outside pressures, it will be citizen involvement and collective native mapping efforts such as Open Street Map that will overcome restrictive policies on both data and services.
