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This is wrong on so many levels. This is anti competitive behavior. Google built their business by scraping data from other websites.

• jrockway 7y ago
  They're asking for this API access for free whereas most customers have to pay. I am not sure Google would cut off API access if they were willing to pay. My experience with the Places API is that it is terrible. We used to use it for our Internet signup form, and there was no way to restrict the address autocompletion to addresses. So people would hedge a little and only type the street, which Google considers a "place", but obviously we don't know if we have availability on a long street or not (it was a per-building service), so we returned "unavailable" when really the answer was "there is no way we can tell you whether or not there's service there". We looked at some OSM-based solutions and those were just as bad. So I have the feeling that there is some opportunity for a competitor here, perhaps that will be their next project.