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Hi,

I work on the Google Maps API team. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the terms does not equate with yours.

Here's the excerpt:

      (a) Free Access (No Fees). Your Maps API Implementation must
      be generally accessible to users without charge and must
      not require a fee-based subscription or other fee-based
      restricted access. This rule applies to Your Content
      and any other content in your Maps API Implementation,
      whether Your Content or the other content is in
      existence now or is added later.
My reading is that in your example, charging businesses to list is okay, but charging users to access the site is not.

https://developers.google.com/maps/terms#section_9_1



You are not a lawyer, sure, but you are also, apparently, not Google's "compliance team". Section 10.1.2 says you can't charge anyone a fee for the "implementation". What is the "implementation" and what isn't? You might have one answer. Someone else in the company might have another. That's typical of big companies, where not everyone may enforce policies different, but still pretty scary for anyone who falls in this gray area.




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