Are we really arguing about whether a massively advertised "free" product will distort a market? If a heavily subsidized Google Maps hadn't been dominating the

Are we really arguing about whether a massively advertised "free" product will distort a market? If a heavily subsidized Google Maps hadn't been dominating the ecosystem for the past decade and a half many more companies would have competed with various approaches to features, UX, and monetization. You seem to be assuming that all of that competition would have resulted in no improvements over the early 2000s. I guess that's possible, but I expect it would have gone more like nearly every other part of the tech landscape and some actual innovation would have happened. No I'm not expecting that there would be a perpetually free and ad-free option, that wouldn't make any sense. But the space of possibility is vastly more broad than totally free or the dreck that Google Maps has turned into.