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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A good [ELI5 answer comes in the second episode of Adam Conover’s “The G Word” on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81037116?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=cp&vlang=en&clip=81567643)
The short version is that the government invested a lot of money to build GPS (and weather tracking) satellites for the military and provided them for general use so companies have spent the last few decades exploiting the free resource for creating for-profit applications on the back of technology and equipment provided and paid for by taxpayers.
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