[noirbot]

I think the issue is less whether they're a monopoly in a legal sense, as much as if these companies really have a leg to stand on to complain about it. "We all decided to not really make a product in area X, and someone else did, so they're bad."

There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.

[pessimizer]

> "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work."

You're acting like it's somehow cowardly not to take on one of the most powerful and infinitely-resourced companies on Earth in an area that they would be happy to lose money on.

And without that competition, google has no real reason to improve maps, and no reason not to degrade maps in support of their other products (if a strategy to do that occurs to them.)

The reason people aren't competing with maps is because they don't want to flush money down the toilet.

[noirbot]

I'm saying it's cowardly to aggressively half-ass your "competition" and then act like you're being bullied by someone who now has a monopoly because they cared more about making a product than you did.

It's a bit rich to claim that Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft were cowed by Google being too resourced and willing to run things at a loss when that's essentially how they built their entire businesses too in the modern era. If it was just OSM or some small dev complaining about Google, then sure, but this is 3 of the biggest, most well funded, most willing to do things that lose money companies in the world complaining that another of them had better planning than them.

I'm not in any way arguing that Google Maps isn't a monopoly, or that someone other than OSM would have been wise to compete with them over the last 10 years, (although Apple has been, and notably doesn't seem to be a part of this).

This feels more like all these companies going "damn, we kinda just expected the OSS community would do all of the work for us to beat Google". Clearly Google Maps is providing value for Google now, even if it's peripheral value for interoperability and improving Search and other services. This just feels like all of these companies going "Wait, Google was right. Accurate geospacial data is valuable to a business even if we're not directly selling it as a product." That feels like something where it's a bit rich to complain about it being a monopoly when you didn't have the foresight to see that it would be valuable.

[PaulsWallet]

You say this as if Meta and Microsoft don't also have bottomless pockets.