Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources.
Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city).
The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.)
Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.
Not in my experience. Two satellite/plane pictures from the same provider can be shifted by several meters. Buildings hand-drawn in OSM are rarely perfectly correct, and won't fit most images anyway due to the first point.
Conversions between coordinate systems are precise up to floating-point errors, that's the easy part and more or less solved by geo-referenced data formats.
EDIT: in fact i am finding it shocking, it’s even invoking government regulation, the simple fact is, even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background
Even here, i hope you don’t misunderstand a geographic system as we talk about all coordination systems, as opposed to geographic vs projected coordinate systems
My understanding is that providers like Maxar report coordinate systems correctly, but that errors in ortho-rectification (due to imprecise or wrong terrain altitude data) make it hard to make two images of the same area match exactly.
> even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background
Not sure I understand what you mean by this. Do you get data that reports a coordinate system different from the one it actually uses?
Any online resources you'd recommend?
For example, OSM has data but doesn't really want to be serving map tiles to the entire world. There are companies that are quite happy to serve map tiles, but I assume that's not all they're looking for either.
The Global Entity Reference System looks quite interesting: if it's going to work well, it's going to have to bear at least a passing resemblance to Unicode in that it will need to capture all the different ways that existing systems refer to distinct entities. I can understand why OSM wouldn't want to build such a system, but I hope it would also be quite valuable to the OSM community.
> is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data
I'd like to interpret that in the "strongest possible" way as HN's guidelines request, but I can't find one. This is the opposite of what the article says.
> Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
I know very little about the space, but couldn't Overture members focus primarily on just filling in those gaps?
> doesn't always spatially match with Google's data or other sources
The map isn't the territory. Consistency with reality is what matters, not what Google says.
I've never run into glaring issues with either. In the past year, the only mistake I've come across was a missing stoplight in Google's.
That's not enough. OSM doesn't offer every kind of data you'd want about an area, it's sometimes not even remotely aligned to other databases or images, it needs to be compared to what other APIs provide to get a result with high quality. This project sounds like it's trying to make these things way easier.
> The map isn't the territory. Consistency with reality is what matters, not what Google says.
Absolutely not if you look at other applications than navigation services. This is _not_ only about Google Maps, it's about their API. See for example the elevation API [1], which gives you an altitude above sea level for any point on earth. This is meant to be combined with other data to build various services. Having alternatives to Google that use a standard format and are generally interoperable is great for developers.
[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/o...
For various reasons, a neighbor and I were looking at some property data in both our town's and the MassGIS databases. Our town had info not in the public MassGIS database and both had more information than either OSM or Google Maps.
This was all public information and you can argue about how much should be readily available but it already is for anyone sophisticated enough to know where to look.
If this project could let all these services interoperate better, that would be a great advance.
Difference is TomTom has its own source it can prove is better that OSM in many places.
But I'll use it (and maybe contribute) if it improves my life without affecting my privacy or control of own devices.
via GSOC ( Google Summer of Code )
- https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2022/organizatio...
- https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2022/organizatio...
This doesn't look bad even though I don't trust Amazon, MS and Meta.
0: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryjones/
1: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/download/attachments/20024102/H...
Sadly it seems many of these large open source foundations are prone to mission creep and stagnation.
When it comes to soliciting investor money, startups are often beset with questions about specific technologies the investors heard were "hot". E.g., "Everybody's talking about cloud these says. What's your story on cloud? How does cloud fit into your strategy?" Just substitute "crypto", "AI", etc. So the startup is forced to either hit the road looking for a VC interested in their product or incorporate cloud, crypto, AI, or whatever into their product.
I suspect that big-ticket donors come to foundations with similar questions, and substitute social issues like climate change, the gender wage gap, etc. "What are you doing about climate change? How is your foundation protecting LGBTQ rights?" So the foundation is put in the position of saying "Our primary mission is maintaining a critical piece of software" and refusing the donor's money, or incorporating the social issue into their mission. Because an awful lot of money could be at stake and the foundation needs money to keep the lights on.
This reminds me of the Mozilla foundation side quests and their inevitable lack of focus.
Odd view on things frankly. This is the one thing the foundation does very well.
They don't push or even care about Desktop linux for a reason, they are also extremely anti GPL, which funny because one of the biggest reasons for linux's success is the GPL, just look at BSD/freebsd and Apple, and compare that to Red hat and Linux.
Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing).
The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms.
This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee.
Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them.
This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers).
These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings.
However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens.
I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.
The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in.
I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with.
A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.
Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.
I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.
- TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade.
- AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services
- Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration
- Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum
- Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation
In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
[0] https://developer.amazon.com/docs/maps/get-started.html
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-a...
Edit: I forgot Flight Simulator :)
They could also steal the user's pics instead of driving cars filming streets around! /s
One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored.
As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.
Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM.
Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.
You're acting like it's somehow cowardly not to take on one of the most powerful and infinitely-resourced companies on Earth in an area that they would be happy to lose money on.
And without that competition, google has no real reason to improve maps, and no reason not to degrade maps in support of their other products (if a strategy to do that occurs to them.)
The reason people aren't competing with maps is because they don't want to flush money down the toilet.
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.
I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money.
I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed.
"Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.
I think things have changed since that suit. Let's see if the gov can do something.
I'm not in touch with the Litigation team and if I were, they certainly wouldn't tell me, but I'd be surprised if plaintiffs have stopped going after the Ads money. I'd bet that still dwarfs whatever pittance Maps brings in.
There's a big gulf between "makes sense" to "quantifiable in court."
Ref: https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
"Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses."
Being available isn't contributing back, Gates.
EEE Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
"OpenStreetMap is open data: you are free to use it for any purpose" - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
And the opposite, can’t imagine they would want to maintain the location of every tree and cow path like OSM does.
It’s been shown many times an open source commodification is able to break a virtual monopoly your competition holds. How many times has google done this over the years?
I dream of making a rough traffic estimator based on GPX files uploaded to OSM. But I don't know when I'll get around to it.
I can’t stand nowadays when I get an email with an address that links to google maps. All of our OSes have default handlers for addresses as they do for phone numbers, so just let me use my preference already.
Outside of Google and Yelp, who else has anything close to an effective database of business information, including hours, names, addresses...
i would imagine its a bit hit and miss depending on where you live and whether there have been people contributing to osm in that area
i also don't have much use for traffic data which helps
However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have:
1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city.
2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following:
(regular Google Maps query, shortcut `gm`) https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s
(directions from my house, shortcut `dir`) https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+m...
(transit directions from my house, shortcut `tdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...
(walking directions from my house, shortcut `wdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...
"Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian.
At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually.
That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project.
It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources.
Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable.
Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.
Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned.
Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features.
I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.
I had to use another map tool for a client in a country that didn't love Google.
God... it was so clunky horrible. All the stuff I thought was simple, like dropping map pins, and stylizing the UI... with the other map it took 10x as long, and just behaved poorly. We were dropping like 40k pins across a country, and the other service didn't even have like a smart clustering feature... so we had to create a bunch of filters and toggles -- rather than just being able to say "5k pins in this city" when they were zoomed out, we had to force users to selected the right filters and then just slow them scattered "blah" as they zoomed. Anyway, totally agree it'd be good to have more competition on this space... but like it's gonna be a few years before the competition pushes Google to do much more than just iterate.
Apple is doing a pretty good job with directions, but they still don't have the "business listings" or abstract searches done right.
A lot of tools out there are OK for directions, but without street-view... or even somewhat recent satellite view... the maps aren't up-to-date. Like... take an area in your city where you know there's construction. Google's on it, like almost as soon as the construction crews start. Apple... they're not far off, especially if there's a detour required. Bing... Open Street Map... forget it, it'll be a month or two, or longer, before they can plot around construction. I'm sure it's hard for companies to dedicate resources until people are using the tool, and of course nobody will use the tool until the dedicate resources. Google's ability to pull in business listings, and reviews, and good directions... it's gonna be a really tall order to get anyone else to dedicate enough resources to push Google farther.
It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.
You may also want to have a look at OpenTopography, following a similar principle but for elevation data.
- 15000 Sentinel-2 scenes over land
- 10980^2 pixels per scene
- 50% lossless compression per scene
- 4 channels (RGB and infrared)
Thanks for the link to OpenTopography, it's an interesting project and elevation data is extremely valuable.
This is rather disappointing, for me google maps is still the only thing I can't find a good replacement for. OSM is extremely out of date, its search is basically useless for anything other than public parks, as no one bothers to put their places outside google maps.
Even using google maps offline is better than osmand and others.
My current flow is to search on google map web then copy the open location code into the app.
the official annoucment mentions plans for navigation and other advanced capabilities in the project.
It's a tough challenge for Microsoft and co.
At low cost though, instrumenting uber or lyft cars would be interesting too. Or UPS/Fedex/Amazon vans.
Good. Do it. I've heard enough, sounds great to me.
I 100% support every one of these efforts every time.
I'm aware Waze and Maps are finally merging together, but let's be real, all the good stuff Maps has gotten recently has come from the Waze side of the house anyway.
I was taught that good data is hard to come by and can be 60 percent of the cost of a project. GPS can be very accurate if you use enough satellites for enough time, but that is probably the exception not the norm. Much GPS data is more like within about 30 feet of the thing.
When the international foot was defined in 1959, a great deal of survey data was already available based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between the survey foot and the international foot would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when the state plane coordinate system (SPCS) is used in the US, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of thousands of feet (hundreds of miles) from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued to be used for surveying in the United States and India for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) had been done in meters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_me...
A fundamental issue is that Maps are 2D and Earth is 3D. Additionally, Earth is not a perfect sphere. This is part of why there are many different map projections, each of which distort something and thus your projection should be chosen based on what you are trying to show on the map. Some projections are better for, say, just North America.
Maps also say as much or more about the mind of the map maker as they do geographic reality. We record a lot of human or political data in maps and biases in how dominant cultures view the world can be readily seen in how we map the world. There are interesting videos about maps of Oceania that show this very clearly, for example: https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ
In spite of having a Certificate in GIS, I've never managed to do some of the technical things I've wanted to do with open source. I do use open source tiles and Paint to make maps I like for some of my websites.
Please don't underestimate how hard this problem space is. I wish there were more options in the mapping space that served my needs. I've looked around at times and found that many of the available resources simply can't do what I want.
I hope this is successful and I look forward to reading up on it more and seeing if it may be relevant to my needs.