Having trouble attracting customers because your product demonstrates incompetence? Then lobby the government to shut down competition.

That's what's really going on here. Accu-Weather, a private (and dreadful) weather service in State College, PA, seems to have successfully convinced its senator Rick Santorum to sponsor a bill that would severely restrict free online information from the National Weather Service.

Contrary to what Accu-Weather says, this isn't simply about the NWS duplicating private information. No--it's about the fact that the NWS is far better than Accu-Weather, and consumers are relying on the NWS, not Accu-Weather (which itself has its own free online forecasts), as a result.

Accu-Weather's track record on the Web has been awful. It's been clobbered by The Weather Channel both in usage and in design. In its city-specific forecasts, the advertisements it runs are from sketchy money lenders. It's the best they can do with limited competence in business development and even worse meteorology skills.

The NWS office in New York isn't always perfect. But it still has by far the best range of narrative and descriptive products around. Its short term forecasts will pinpoint the progress of a line of thunderstorms or a sea breeze. Its zone forecasts explain that the day will begin partly cloudy before a chance of rain--unlike the simplistic icon slapped on an Accu-Weather Web page.

At the end of the day, this isn't about the line between the private and public sector. It's about a bunch of losers out there in State College, PA that can't run a business and want the government to bail them out.