There is a bunch of laws that govern what someone who has innovated, developed, and authored can and can&#x27;t dictate; they&#x27;re called &quot;intellectual property laws&quot;. Even if they&#x27;ve collected it, Google does not own information about the road system; facts themselves, like &quot;Road A exists at lat X and long Z&quot;, cannot be copyrighted.<p>See <i>Feist v. Rural Telephone</i> for more on this. The only reason application of <i>Feist</i> is generally limited in cases of online access is because we have a theory that accessing a publicly available database containing phone numbers is akin to accessing someone else&#x27;s private property, and therefore they can dictate whatever they want under theories like trespass to chattels, whereas consulting a printed telephone book in your home is decidely not accessing the phone company&#x27;s property.<p>This is a pernicious, subtle issue now that we&#x27;re becoming so dependent on online access provided by someone else&#x27;s servers instead of accessing printed documents that we possess in our homes. Possession is 9&#x2F;10 of the law, as they say. We need to rethink how &quot;possession&quot; applies to digital resources.<p>Likewise, there are laws around how much access a private property owner must grant to members of the public, especially if that property owner is running a business that is generally accessible to the public. Private property owners are allowed to declare some people trespassers, but each jurisdiction has different laws surrounding what the public can do on private property and when a trespass is allowable. For example, California&#x27;s state constitution guarantees the right to hold reasonable protests in private shopping centers that are generally accessible to the public, whether the property owner likes it or not.<p>No one is saying there is a requirement for another business &quot;to help invest&quot; in any other; there may be requirements not to interfere with someone else&#x27;s business by attempting to block what is otherwise public and freely available access to non-copyrightable information.<p>IANAL.<p>Routebuilder is fortunate that OpenStreetMap has collected much of the same data and that they can just code against a different API and continue to operate.