Full disclosure: I prefer to walk and public transport, so I generally use those when I’m late. This means that I rarely use any and I tend to pick whichever se

Full disclosure: I prefer to walk and public transport, so I generally use those when I’m late. This means that I rarely use any and I tend to pick whichever seems to work seamlessly, namely the one not asking me for my credit card number, asking to confirm my phone number with a SMS handshake that takes five minutes, etc. I remember navigating between several options including Addison Lee (a local equivalent in London), local taxis if they have an app (in Stockholm: great service, inexplicably expensive). That does mean that Google Maps will win and its default option too. I suspect that the way they display services, notably prices and availability will have a dramatic impact too: at the moment, it’s a band. It’s all too easy to show a cheap low price for instance and I suspect that Google Maps might want to argue that they should review estimates and compare them to actual charges to enforce consistent labelling. Same for availability: you can say a car will be there in three minutes, but have that change to five once you clic, etc. Overall, it does look like an anti-trust issue. I guess, in that case, a China-Wall between Google Maps and Waymo, transparent ranking process, etc. would be necessary. I can’t imagine not having access to either a mapping service, or the convenience of comparing public transport with ride-hailing. I’ve been an advocate for auditing a lot of algorithms by publicly-appointed experts for a while now. You need a good understanding of machine learning to audit the political impacts of Facebook News Feed and the Call to Vote button, for instance. Not all countries can appoint their expert though, so we might need to have smaller countries agree to trust the expert from larger nation groups.