This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is a national service that countries should provide as part of being a nation, and there's a long history of countries developing addressing systems that does not rely on some predatory intellectual property system.
5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are many better alternatives.
The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem using words in that they are localized to the country's language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's all the problems people keep finding with their word lists; that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it.
PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones, too.
This couples with the technological issues outlined in the article above. I believe the vitriol against W3W is fueled by the combination of rent-seeking behavior on a standard of poor technical quality.
I’m also bothered that one of the main use cases W3W’s marketing highlights is for specifying locations in emergencies, a totally non-commercial/public-good application. W3W presents itself convincingly to laymen as this sort of public-good open standard, but they’re just another startup with a proprietary product they’re hoping to monopolize.
It's a great idea, a mediocre implementation, and a set of business practices that make the antichrist jealous.
On top of that, their bloodthirsty pursuit of any criticism means that legitimate discussions of the system's flaws can't happen in the open. The lack of that criticism may have encouraged some services to adopt W3W without realizing its flaws, and there's already some hinting that such a flaw may have already interfered with actual rescue operations:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363
Thankfully the rescue was able to proceed once they switched to another coordinate system, and that case didn't result in a fatality. How many other such cases are there? We might never know. The company may have literal blood on its hands at this point, but fixing the flaws would require discussing them first, which we can't do as long as they're empowered to shut down discourse.
and here[3] is a long article of why w3w isn't safe for the use-cases they're peddling.
tl;dr: they're a garbage company, with a garbage product, run by ghouls.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-wh...
[2] https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable...