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Re:Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life? by handrous on Friday December 10, 2021 @01:26PM (#29513542)
We don't know what sorts of other free (volunteer-led) or paid services would replace these, if they went away.

For maps in particular, it seems to me providing high-quality mapping and traffic data should be a government service, with any competition being mainly over interfaces or add-ons to that. The basics of it seem like infrastructure—and also something the government should have already, in one form or another—and not something it's helpful to have lots of companies competing to achieve, or smaller companies being locked out of doing something cool with it because they don't have the resources to generate all that themselves and can't afford to license it.

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