GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
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There are two separate questions.
1. It’s not “free”. You pay an annual subscription fee: taxes. It’s “free” insofar as things like roads are “free”. It’s “not free” insofar as critical infrastructure, like roads and utilities and the FAA and GPS are paid with taxes.
2. It’s profitable for companies to use GPS and created value-added stuff on top (e.g., Google Maps, etc), because those services are loss-leaders. Like how grocery stores will be willing to lose money on certain items if it brings you into the store to buy other stuff, which gets marked up. They know you won’t just go for a stick of butter and a tube of toothpaste, so when those are discounted, bread and milk and beef get marked up. In the same way that Google makes Google Maps and GMail for free, but then read all your emails to figure out which ads to serve you. They make money by selling (what they claim is “anonymized”) data about you, and having advertisers pay for it. It’s the same way you get the NFL Super bowl for free. It’s “free” in that you don’t pay. It’s “not free” in that you have to sit through ads, subsidized by advertisers. The advertising revenue pays for the broadcast and the game. It’s literally how the entire world of “free” services operates.
The Government uses tax revenue to do all sorts of things. Some things make us better (NIH research grants to improve medicine). Some things improve quality of life (road, GPS). Some things simply support progress (NASA, NSF funding for high-energy-physics). Some things make us safer (national defense, from which GPS comes, and things like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act). Some things make us more education (the entire public education system). That’s why we pay taxes.
#Everything that is free exists because someone wants to use that free thing as a way to show you stuff they want you to buy.
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