Charging for a public-good data feed

Same 402 stack as the rest of the 2016 set. This is the one that makes the family’s central question unavoidable: what does a paid wrapper add over data anyone can already get for nothing?

There is an honest answer and it is not information. It is format, aggregation and availability. NHC products are fixed-width text advisories and shapefiles for forecast cones, published on a strict advisory cadence in a shape that is stable and genuinely unpleasant to parse. Turning that into clean JSON is real work, and a caller paying to skip it is paying for the parser. Legitimate, as long as nobody pretends otherwise.

Caching is where it gets ethical rather than economic. During a storm the NHC’s servers are under load from everyone who needs them, and a wrapper passing every caller straight through adds avoidable traffic to a public resource at the worst moment. A cache is the right thing to do and it directly conflicts with freshness during exactly the hours when a stale advisory is dangerous.

That tension was never resolved. A cached response twenty minutes old is fine on day three of a forecast and not fine at landfall.

Publicly funded data should be visibly credited.