Part I: Why Google holds monopoly in a $30Bn Mapping Industry?Sometimes I wonder how my parents managed to go for road trips—paper maps, random directions from strangers, and all the hassle. Things improved slightly in the late ’90s, when Yahoo launched one of the first online map services. You’d type in a start and end point, wait for the page to reload (patience was a virtue in the ’90s), and come up with a basic route plan. By the early 2000s, it was handling up to 35% of all map queries i...

Part I: Why Google holds monopoly in a $30Bn Mapping Industry?Sometimes I wonder how my parents managed to go for road trips—paper maps, random directions from strangers, and all the hassle. Things improved slightly in the late ’90s, when Yahoo launched one of the first online map services. You’d type in a start and end point, wait for the page to reload (patience was a virtue in the ’90s), and come up with a basic route plan. By the early 2000s, it was handling up to 35% of all map queries i...