Europe has loads of nice things. You should visit sometime.
This ruling, presumably, is about a big company subsidising its unprofitable mapping business with another part of its business until the small fish die.
> Europe has loads of nice things. You should visit sometime.
HN is not a place for flame wars about countries (or continents). He had a valid point, as he was referencing the hostile legal climate for doing (some kinds of) business in several European countries (and in some cases the EU).
There's no blanket prohibition on offering things for free that cost money to develop. There are free French search engines and newspapers with free websites, for example, as well as French companies that develop open-source software. A court would have to find that the free service is being cross-subsidized and offered at a loss for the purpose of driving competitors out of business, to later profit from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing). That's also illegal in the U.S., but U.S. courts tend to require a higher bar to demonstrate it.
