the things Google has created and shared into the whole of human knowledge Do they really share it, though? You can't download and reuse data from Google Maps

the things Google has created and shared into the whole of human knowledge Do they really share it, though? You can't download and reuse data from Google Maps or Street View the way you can from OpenStreetMap, say. I'm not saying this is a fatal problem. Google Maps is a lot more popular than OSM so the free-with-ads closed source approach clearly has a lot going for it. But the data isn't public, they own it.