>Yes, let's talk about the unassailable infrastructure that Lyft and Uber have built

It's a two sided market that takes a significant investment to create. Yes, Google can add G-Car to maps, but where are the drivers coming from? They're not going to switch unless they can expect more income than from Lyft/Uber. Google can't provide that without investing a lot of money in incentives.

The best analog to Lyft/Uber is Mastercard/Visa. It's theoretically easy to enter the market, but in practice it's going to be very difficult to develop your own two sided marketplace going against the incumbent competitors.

Yeah I was being sarcastic. My point is that theres a limited technical challenges on the scale of feasibility ("anyone _can_ build...). The big challenges are on the cost/return side of things. Google Fiber faced tremendous pressure for if it was responsible spending or not, which they ultimately decided it was not. So there's good skepticism here about why the valuation would be that high, but I think its a stretch to say they don't have a moat and they're doomed / you cant build a successful company that way. AT&T / Verizon seem very comparable (they don't have a technology moat, they have a first-mover advantage which has been stable for a long time).

My impression is the opposite, so in the absence of harder evidence we're at an impasse. But even if Google Maps isn't widely used, Google could trivially spend the cash to market the feature if it wished to, or hell, just pop up an alert upon opening the Lyft or Uber app on Android that says "Did you know that you can compare ride-sharing prices across all services in your area via Google Maps? Click here to try it!" (in the same way that visiting any Google property on a non-Google browser pesters the user into downloading Chrome). Google already owns the platform, Google already owns the maps data, Google already owns the users.