I can't stress enough that it should be one of the job of the state to do this or make this happen (e.g. in France we have https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_adresse_nationale which, restrospectively, is probably why I never had any problem with addresses in France).
In the worst offenders, you have UK, where Royal Mail charges you for postcode data [0], or China where private mapping is simply illegal [1] and you have to go through some state-approved cash register (i.e. NavInfo).
[0] https://www.poweredbypaf.com/licence-our-products/licence-ag...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
That is a very bold statement? Do you have a source for that?
Sibling parent already mentioned BAN, but you can also check cadastre [0] which is the main source of polygon data for France on OpenStreetMap. Under the general subdomain [1] you have access to all sorts of stuff, but geography wise, there are plenty of geotagged aerial photographs, both historical and current. You also have shapefile data for towns, regions, postal codes, you name it.
No shenanigans, all official, verified, and regularly updated.
[0] https://cadastre.data.gouv.fr/
[2] https://datanova.legroupe.laposte.fr/explore/?sort=modified
It would be nice for property prices to be included the central government data. It is free and publicity available but from each municipality or many websites that republish the data along with analytics.
I guess it is groundbreaking for most countries.
https://geo.api.gouv.fr/adresse https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr
But you're right, other countries could do as well, in their language. It's hard to be aware of all the initiatives.
Actually, the UK is kind of a funny situation. A number of years ago the Ordnance Survey began publishing postcode data under a free (CC) licence. Royal Mail wasn't too happy, but as Royal Mail's APIs were a bit simpler and more direct (OS service was SPARQL-only) so I guess they didn't feel threatened enough to change their pricing. I worked for a company that had an account with Royal Mail at the time and I was tasked with parsing OS data.
That's many years ago and now that I revisit the OS offerings have changed. They appear to have relicensed, and split their offerings between a free db[0] without full addresses and a commercial db[1] with full addresses.
Either way, Royal Mail may have the established customer base but I wouldn't look to them exclusively to see who's "leading the way" in this space in the UK.
[0] https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/op...
[1] https://ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/ad...
On the other hand, having lived in a country where such databases were notoriously unreliable, such automated processing didn't exist, so I didn't encounter that problem.
Sometimes, having something work "way too well" can lead people to believe it's perfect, and enforce it too strictly.
It can be accessed as a map layer at http://geopunt.be/ or as open data at https://overheid.vlaanderen.be/informatie-vlaanderen/product...