Somewhat related, I always liked the concept of https://what3words.com/
I'll happily boycott that for-profit company which is masquerading as a public utility, but charging money and going after anyone who reverse engineers what words are what locations.
See also the comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271
This is exactly the sort of thing that shouldn't be a private company, just like Lat/Lon coordinates and street addresses are effectively public domain, any suitable replacement for lat/lon should also be public domain.
https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1570062564523917312
> the actual address should be "keen.lifted.fired" instead of "keen.listed.fired" and someone clearly misheard over the phone
That scoring/clustering process makes for interesting problems in their own right, especially if one throws accents into the mix.