I didn't really read that as much of a scandal. Just that they were increasing prices and people got upset.

I'm upset by this because I just got burned by it last week. I needed their geocoding API for a project at work. I didn't realize I was looking at their old pricing page at first, and came to the conclusion it would cost us about $65 a month. Once I realized my mistake, I did the math again and it came to over $700 a month, which couldn't be justified for the use case. So I've spent the last week implementing the functionality I needed myself. While I agree it's not a 'scandal', it's extremely frustrating and baffling to me.

yes, I agree that's extremely frustrating. It was a huge price increase, and probably needed to be justified or at least have a different tiered structure to make it less expensive.

That's only screwing the other sites that integrate with google maps. Not so much the end user that is using google maps directly.