MetService data-sharing complaint rejected by Commerce Commission

Friday, 21 December 2018

A private weather forecaster's claim the MetService is engaging in 'misleading advertising' has been rejected by the Commerce Commission.

WeatherWatch took MetService to the commission in September, claiming the state-owned enterprise's delays in releasing publicly available weather information from surface and upper-air observations were affecting its business.

Philip Duncan, the managing director of private forecasting company WeatherWatch, who wants genuinely open access to data.

Managing director Philip Duncan said what was then advertised as 'open-access data' was not open at all.

Delays of up to six hours in making it available on the MetService website meant it lost most of its usefulness for forecasting, he said.

Accessibility to weather radar data, like this 2013 MetService image of thunderstorms over Christchurch, forms part of WeatherWatch's complaints to the Commerce Commission.

* Why do we need both MetService and Niwa to provide weather forecasts?

* MetService 'blocking data' to rival** WeatherWatch

He complained to the commission, saying MetService's behaviour was in breach of the Fair Trading Act.

However, on Wednesday Duncan had an email from the commission, saying it was not pursuing his complaint as it was 'not clear' the Act had been breached .

Duncan has also made other complaints under the Commerce Act about potentially anti-competitive behaviour over data, including rain radar images.

He is also unhappy there are now two taxpayer-funded agencies forecasting the weather – MetService and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The commission said it was still reviewing those Commerce Act complaints.

A MetService spokesman said on Friday it did not want to comment on this week's decision.

In January, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment released a report it commissioned from PricewaterhouseCoopers on public access to both MetService and Niwa weather data.

It found their restrictions on data were far tougher than in the United States, Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom and France, and said they could potentially be stopping third-party competition and holding back innovation.

It also found:

- Weather data was more expensive in New Zealand than in other countries

- Prices for observation data were not transparent.

- Licence restrictions were more prohibitive in New Zealand.

- Intellectual property rights in commercial agreements were restrictive.

- Data that was 'free of licence and cost restrictions' was not easily accessible.

- The same data was 'delayed, and real-time data is not open'.

In his Fair Trading Act complaint, Duncan said 'open data' meant 'data with no delays, no restrictions, no hoops to jump through'.

'MetService data is not openly accessible for the first three to six hours. But during those hours MetService is using this data as part of their commercial monopoly.'

Duncan told Stuff on Friday the commission's decision was another knock-back for private weather forecasting companies after nearly a decade of getting nowhere on the issue, even with the MBIE-led report.

He believed the complaint was 'fairly black-and-white'.

'Out of every one I've made, I thought this was the clearest. A lawyer would say that is not open data. It goes against MBIE's own advice on what open data is.'