...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.
Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's creating value, not sucking value.
Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.
The economic value left on the table by volunteers is consumed not by the ones who need it most, but by people who need it the least. This breaks the 2nd principle of justice as formulated by Rawls. Shall I say more...
As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that if their share of edits is growing that they are providing free labor to me and people like me, no?
Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.