I am certainly not an expert on international data access regulations. But at the same time, there is more than enough of that information publicly available to make it a basic first step in a mapping application/dataset.

Open address has a good map that show this (http://results.openaddresses.io/), but for any area that is grey on that map you are going to be a long way from that "basic first step" you talk about. Adress data is hard, there are so many shitty collections with bad licenses.

Thanks for that link. I dropped their coverage chart into a spreadsheet to come up with 1,184,252,000 (surely estimated) people covered by their address data - not to mention covered commercial addresses, which started this thread. My point was that there is enough green on that map, and enough obvious, critical demand, to make it a pretty fundamental feature for a mapping process, not that it would work most of the time.