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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The US government made it free for everyone.
I guess you could say American tax dollars pay for it.
Of course, lots of countries have their *own* GPS systems. Because they don’t trust the US government to not turn off access.
But ultimately it would probably be kind of hard to turn off access at this point. It’s really not *that* complicated a technology. It’s basically just a bunch of radios on satellites. And how long it takes you to get signals from various ones tells you where you’re at.
Edit: Russia, China, and the USA have their own GPS systems. The EU also has their own GPS system. But they’re not one country. All of these are available more or less for free. So taxpayers of those countries pay for it.
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