text: just thought i would throw out there that since about christmas there has been a pretty steady stream of reversions and redacted changesets from DWG member Vladimir, which for a week increased the size of https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions from its typical 400-odd pages to 14'000 (!) displayed by text browser `lynx'.  it's back to a bit over 500 pages at the moment as another set of redactions gets posted from copying from Here maps (yandeks also got mentioned in the last week).
  
  now these are commercial providers like google, not the us federal government which i understand explicitly puts its data in public domain which is acceptable for osm, while local texas governments are a lot more possessive of their data - although i understand that the usgs large-scale aerial imageries project was abandoned in previous form to contract out to google, so i don't know what affect such privatisation will have on federal data, and that i leave to those familiar with us copyright rules, but that is one reason why the us presents less of white space than other countries and why you don't have to worry about borders and such.
  
  now i don't know the background behind the  current large-scale worldwide redaction of data and why it's an issue now, but i would guess it's not so much self-policing like we are trying to do here, but an official DWG/LWG complaint that probably has yet to come from google so far which we should not treat as tolerance or turning a blind eye (i am aware of a massive revert of google data that osm is slowly recovering from as more mappers get involved).
  
  much government data around me is contracted out to private companies so that those government agencies are very defensive about unauthorised use and osm/users have gotten in serious trouble.
  
  this is why i have started to make sure that references referring to other incompatible maps disappear from view even if the comment refers to a fix, to avoid that temptation i have seen too often bitten.