[coldtea]

Well, they only took us to the moon, deliver our mail, handle invasions, wars, and other emergency situations, and so on. Oh, and they also gave us this internet thing.

In fact, before the web era, they also made the best maps (e.g. the British military maps).

[manigandham]

And today we have the ISS supplied by private space companies, UPS and Fedex and Amazon handling logistics around the world, and most aerospace and defense innovation and manufacturing handled by private contractors.

Government vs private is not mutually exclusive. Like another commenter said, the US Geological Survey already has mapping data available. Adding in traffic from local agencies and weather from the National Weather Service is relatively simple so we can definitely have a neutral public maps service. None of that requires forcing Google Maps to close though.