The industry I work in thrives on data; we consume loads of the stuff and in turn we generate petabytes of it. I'm talking about data in general, not the geographic, mapping or place data that I usually write about.But the longer I work in the Internet industry the more convinced I become that, as an industry, we need to get our act together. How else to explain the bizarre, rapidly changing and capricious nature of how we gain access to, use, pay, don't pay and disseminate data?We're socially conditioned to assume that free does not equate to good, hence the adage "there's no such thing as a free lunch". So stuff that costs is good and stuff that's free isn't. But normal rules don't apply here.