[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.