[cordellwren]

Predatory pricing is the issue here, not high cost of entry. Anti-competitive activities have specific definitions rooted in the study of industrial organization. You can't go around making judgment calls based on what seems intuitively good or bad to you.

[calciphus]

The anti-competitive question varies country to country, but in the US (where Google, the example given, is based) the question is: "does this cause consumer harm?" not "does this make it hard for another company to make money at it?".

Taking information that used to be locked up, re-discovering it from the "ground truth" (literally driving every road in some cases), and then giving it to the world for free does ruin some business models based on gate keeping, but it doesn't harm the consumer.

So should society force Google to charge for Maps? How much?

[cordellwren]

No, anticompetitive behavior is not determined with a single question. It's a whole field of study. You may as well say companies evaluate their code by the single criteria of "how fast does it run?"

With a price artifically approaching zero in a product with high margnial cost and higher long run average cost, product tying with android and google search at the least, dominant and uncontestable market power, there's a lot of bells ringing here, and more than enough to suspect significant deadweight loss to society and, yes, "harm" to consumers.

All of these terms have specific definitions, by the way. They don't just mean good or bad. And that list is far from exhaustive.