Government or non-governmental public bodies. Or new legal / administrative entities that are not driven by profit; we are not, as a matter of fact, tied to a binary choice situation whereby private businesses are the better option for such a crucial service.

> Isn't open-source software the closer model to what you desire ?

It can (and it should) definitely be open source, I concur. But that's not necessarily an ownership and control discussion, even less so when we're taking into consideration the infrastructure required for such a project. Genuine public ownership / control assumes giving the leverages (decision-making, governance, choices, infrastructure, model etc.) to the public itself in one form or another. It can be done via a government, but there are reasons to suspect that governments will eventually abuse it or under-fund it, like they often eventually have done; however, that is still a better option than private ownership and control.

> A "public" map app in the sense of "developed and hosted by the government" could enable large funding, but could also be quite frightening.

I disagree. If it's a dictatorship, then private ownership and governance are already not very credible or private. If it's a real democracy, then the public should be able to exert control over it via its institutions and democratic processes. That said, I also prefer a model where the government doesn't own such a platform and dictate how it's developed and used.

In a hierarchy of ownership and governance models from worst to best, private is likely the worst (Google, Apple & the like), followed by governments, and genuine public ownership where citizens themselves can decide how it operates and evolves. The question of money is also partially real: private companies themselves don't create money out of thin air, they rely on public infrastructure (from currency, to legislation/operating rules, to the economy) to operate and need paying consumers that have money, especially a b2c company like this one. In other words, the money is already there, it's just out of reach.