"Thank you for contacting us. The new Playing Conditions Calculation formula is not being shared to reduce unauthorized use of the WHS and Rules of Handicapping by those who are not authorized."
This is exactly what I was expecting when I said I suspected this was about lock-in earlier.
So if $40 to get a cap is gonna "break" you, then golf may just not be for you.
So, the $40 isn't the only barrier, though. There is a significant barrier to player acquisition when it comes to getting people in the (club) door. For my purposes, I'm going to talk about Scrabble, as I think they've done a fairly good job with regards to their status as a governing body with the acquisition to new scrabble players.
So, imagine we want to play scrabble. We can choose any dictionary we want, but deciding on which dictionary can be a point of conflict between players. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter (and I can't stress this enough to the folks who think I'm "complaining" about this...
I think it really doesn't matter, but I still think it's worthwhile to think about). So, Scrabble players need a governing body, and the
Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was born (there are more details here, but that's the general gist). Now, if we're trying to promote the game of Scrabble, imagine asking people to find a scrabble players club (at some expense, even if it's only a few dollars/month), and only after that do they get access to the dictionary. Yes, a bunch of folks who are freeloading (it's just a game people) would almost certainly sign up with a club, but we will never know how many folks will balk when they see that they need to join some club,
and become a card-carrying scrabble player, just to play their friends at scrabble according to the rules. Here, club membership would be prerequisite just to play Scrabble, instead of leaving club membership reserved (as it should be) for scrabble fanatics, who become fanatics by playing scrabble, according to the official rules, with their fanatical friends.
People forget how much institutional knowledge is required to navigate these "but it's only $30s" clubs we're talking about. To illustrate this point, if anyone here every plays scrabble with their friends or kids, how many scrabble clubs are in your town? (That isn't a rhetorical question, there is almost certainly a scrabble club in your city.) Do you know how much they charge for membership? Do you know how you would even find that out? The answer for most people is an overwhelming "no" and that's exactly the position that non-golfers are in unless they are lucky enough to be related to golf-nerds like us. Most people who are trying to find out how to get a handicap are going to ask their local course/club, who have every incentive
not to point them in the direction of the cheapest option. I'm pretty sure my club is $135 for new members, which is
dirt cheap for my area of brick and mortar clubs, and they're not going to tell anyone to join a $30 e-club in Kansas, even if they knew one existed (they don't).
So, imagine if we were banned from using the Scrabble Dictionary unless we join a local scrabble club. It seems so dumb, to the point that think it would be counterproductive to the governing body. Thankfully, that's not what they do at all, in fact, they do the exact opposite, they give a bare-bones version of the word list away for free.
As a purely practical matter, how would you propose to make the data available every day to third parties so that they can run their own system to calculate their members' handicaps. Would you download the raw scores of all the players that played at the same course as their member played and let the third party use their own system to calculate the PCC, differential and handicap index that day. Or would you have the USGA GHIN system do all the calculations and then give it gratis to the third party?
I would proposed that the governing bodies do the exact same thing that Scrabble does. Provide non-members with an extremely stripped down version of the handicapping system. In scrabble, you can look up an exact word, and they will tell you whether it is playable, or not. They won't tell you much of anything about the word, and if you want to know about the word, too bad, buy a dictionary, support the system. That's how I think it ought to be with golf.
Provide no stats, no gps, no anything except an explicitly
unofficial handicap. It should be intentionally clunky and ugly. The non-members are not included in any PCC calculations, so the handicap is technically not official in a very real sense, but it will be close enough, and be designed for non-member play. If you really wanted to be hostile to the non-member (which I would not support), you could even force the non-member to upload their data on a desktop. That's what I would do, it's just a stupid math problem, and you can force the data storage in a cookie stored on the users side. The other way is just to publish a PCC database, so third parties could manually make adjustments.
At the same time, the USGA would receive
a mountain of valuable data at effectively no cost. We could know what the
actual average handicap is (suspected to be around 25, AFAIK), instead of the average active-member handicap (around 15). It would be an extremely effective way to advertise local clubs, products, and establish what demographics are playing what courses (this data could be sold or just given to those courses).
I fully agree that there are costs associated with creating the GHIN system. I just see it as short-run effective for growing the USGA's membership, but long-run detrimental to the game. The entire point of this is that only a few years ago, a handicap was just a math problem you could do at home. Now it's tightly guarded secret by an organization that's meant to represent us.
At the end of the day, the USGA has created a
de facto barrier to the game that just didn't exist a couple years ago. I actually like the PCC adjustment in principal, but I see the way it's being used as unnecessarily extractive, and a similar system could be used
to eliminate the costs associated with creating ratings/slope for courses... instead of adding to those existing costs. A governing body can use it's position of authority by solving coordination problems and creating economies of scale. Or it can require membership for participation. I see no legitimate reason for the governing body to intentionally flex it's authority in this way. We should be courting new club members by showing them how much fun being in a golf club is (we could have clubs host unofficial vs official net tournaments, say, once per year). We shouldn't court them by calling them freeloaders and taking our ball and going home. It seems like something only an MBA would come up with. Again, it's not something I'm going to fall on my sword over, but it's something I disagree with in principle.