This isn't a free service, though; this is a temporarily-free version of their Enterprise API, which they plan to charge (a lot) for later. I.e. they precisely are trying to drive everyone out of business before jacking the price up.

That's only the allegation by the cartographer company, it's not proven, and it really reeks of thought crime. (How can you be sued for something you "plan" to do with no proof of such a plan?)

And as the article says, that is NOT like Google at all.

And another thing, is that the service who is doing the whining here is quite objectively crap, compared to google maps.

Initially free services that later have the prices jacked up seems to be pretty in character for Google. See, e.g., App Engine and the translation API.

App engine is still free (though with lower limits), and the translation API is $20 per million characters.

That's hardly predatory pricing, and doesn't have anything to due with the fact that they were just sanctioned for something they hadn't done yet.

I actually have some sympathy for companies that are working solely in an industry like cartography, that have Google come in and offer the same service for free.

Yes, on the one hand, it forces the competitors to develop better products and justify charging for them. But on the other, Google is clearly using their billions made from search advertising to dominate another unrelated industry.

It was wrong when Microsoft did it, it's still wrong when Google does it.

>But on the other, Google is clearly using their billions made from search advertising to dominate another unrelated industry.

That would hold water if the products they were "dominating" were competitive in any way, shape, or form. The competition frankly sucks. I'd believe Google was killing them if they weren't busy killing themselves by offering a completely and totally inferior product at a much higher price.