Google is guilty of abusing its dominant position with Google Maps per a court in France. It was ordered to pay €500,000 in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a €15,000 euro fine against Bottin Cartographes. The company, until it was put out of business, offered online maps.
February 1 is the cut-off for companies with onine mapping websites to have a license from the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. Google has applied for one, but does not yet have approval. That suggests its ok to keep running as is, but can't launch anything "new."
After Google launched its Ocean extension for Google Earth back in 2009, oddly well laid-out features on the floor of the Atlantic had been speculated by some to be evidence of the existence of Atlantis, the legendary ancient civilization said to have vanished into the sea thousands of years ago. Those theories have been sunk, though, with NOAA's sobering clarification on exactly what those features are: errors in sonar rendering caused by assembling multiple data sets together, which is exactly what Google Earth does to create a global picture of Earth's oceans. It's a fairly common problem — students at UC San Diego have spent the last three years removing those types of errors from the data by hand, and as of last week, "Atlantis" has been once again wiped off the map, so to speak.
In Korea, Google's December enhancements to Maps, including showing the insides of some 1000 stores in Seoul, has meant competitors had to scramble. They are adding more routing options, more data, easier to use icons on mobiles to try to compete.
