In September 1983, President Reagan took a bold step and ordered the US military to make the then-new Global Positioning System (GPS) available to everyone. The change in policy wasn’t costless. Building the satellites, sending them to space and maintaining them ran into the billions. But Reagan believed having everyone use GPS would be worth it. He was right. GPS led to breakthrough innovation from fleet management to smartphones, created new global markets, and enabled societal progress at scale.

It may be time to apply the lesson from GPS to digital platforms.

In our data age, access to data is increasingly crucial—whether for economic success, innovation, or human survival. But data is unevenly distributed. A very small number of very large platforms companies collect and control huge amounts of data. Nobody else can access these potential wells of insights. Without sufficient data, we understand less and choose badly, individually and as a society.

Data access could help make mobility more efficient and sustainable. Today, Tesla cars collect mountains of data from sensors and send it to the mothership. That data is only used to advance Tesla’s self-driving capabilities. But the data could be far more useful. With it we could identify perilous road sections and city streets in need of a pedestrian crossing. Improved road safety could save lives and reduce the million plus annual deaths worldwide caused by traffic accidents.

Or take Alzheimer’s: the illness is likely caused by a combination of factors. To develop a cure requires a joint analysis of genetic and environmental data at scale. But that’s impossible because large industry players keep the relevant data to themselves. This isn’t just a problem for treating Alzheimer’s; it applies to most illnesses that affect humanity.

The solution is obvious and powerful. Like with other common goods such as security, justice, basic education and infrastructure, government action is needed. When it comes to access to data, government action is neither untested nor radical. We have made data accessible before when it was held by a powerful corporation. For instance, in the 1950s, the US government forced American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) to settle an antitrust lawsuit by mandating that all patents of its famous Bell Labs be opened to US businesses, including key transistor patents. Within years, this kickstarted what we now call Silicon Valley.

We face substantial challenges around the world—pandemics threatening our health, climate change and so on. Limiting access utterly fails to solve the big issues we face. The successes of markets tell us that the free flow of information is crucial—that to know more about the world leads to better informed decisions.

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