> If google can't make money with maps, why isn't map taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.

Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?

Without donations OpenStreetMap would also lose money. But obviously people (and companies) are much more willing to donate to a project when it's a charity/non-profit, instead of the product of one of the biggest companies in the world.

Maybe people are more willing to donate to a non-profit, but I am not so sure the same goes for companies. Today companies have to pay a license fee if they are using Google maps in their services. A non-profit can of course continue with licensing the service, but if they make that optional, 99% of the companies would stop paying.

I donate to OSM (both money and data). I would never in a million years donate to Google. They don't need my support.

＞ What about indirect revenue

This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.

Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.

It takes serious funding to make an excellent mapping app that contains worldwide business info, and a whole hell of a lot of paid review staff. A non-profit/charity can't really tackle this well. And since having a good mapping app is so important to the use of a smartphone generally, it makes sense for the two major smartphone OS vendors to each have a platform-standard mapping app.

I'm pretty sure you could use AI these days, to replicate the accuracy of Google Anything.

And there isn't a paid review staff, people who filter maybe, but Google doesn't review anything.

Every single point here is wrong.

Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).

So you already can use OpenStreetMap, but don't? Presumable because Google Maps is better? So maybe the answer is that "we" don't make Maps a non-profit majority of people (me and, apparently, you included) actually prefer superior ad-supported product?

But is Maps actually a net loss for Google, or are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques to make it <i>appear</i> unprofitable as an additional disincentive to the lawsuits that AlbertCory mentioned?

It's a massive net loss for Google, where do you think there revenue there would come from? A few API users don't pay for a massive amount of people working on keeping the map data up to date.

> are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques

there's no need. Whereas individual movies do need a fake P&L, Google doesn't report Maps P&L at all. AFAIK.

Even if people wanted to do this for some reason, it is practically extremely difficult to extract a codebase from google3.