[33955985]

It was always odd to me that entire businesses relied on what was essentially the goodwill of a corporation. I think the same about things like microG in the Android world. They just… use Google’s API without paying and yet we think it’ll all work out?

[barnabee]

Acessing APIs from 3rd party clients isn't "goodwill" and should be legally protected.

[amatecha]

I believe the same thing! It's rare to see someone hold this view. I got quite a lot of pushback when I argued the same concept a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33016155 On the upside it spawned a ton of discussion with lots of people other than myself, which was nice to see.

[politician]

This is a tricky area. Do we legally protect access to unpublished APIs or only published, supported APIs? If there is no API, should we legally require an API? Should the API support 100% of the services operations or may it only support some subset? What if the API is unprofitable, can the business reduce the set of operations supported or remove it entirely? Can they even release a new version of the API and retire an older version?

What, exactly, are you asking for when you say that "accessing APIs from 3rd party clients ... should be legally protected"?

[barnabee]

I think a good starting point would be something like a digital right to roam.

So you should not be able to enforce contractual terms, ask app stores or platforms to block, or use technical measures to frustrate access to an API.

If you expose it to the public internet you should be required to ambivalent about which software an otherwise valid use uses to connect to it.

I think there’s also a reasonable argument for some core protocols and services to be treats and regulated as a hybrid between public and private, kind of like the banking system.

[33955985]

Who built the API and who pays to maintain it? These are not public goods in the traditional sense. The incentives must align or else the benefit is only maintained through benign neglect.

[barnabee]

Who cares? Making the world meaningfully better will probably break some business models.

Fact is if you expose an API publicly, at that boundary you [should] lose the right to control what software interacts with it. Web browsers are called user agents for a reason.

If a service is valuable, people will pay for it directly and more than cover the cost of hosting an API. If a company can’t make money without hijacking people’s attention and tricking them into doing things that profit them by controlling the software running on their users’ computers then maybe it shouldn’t exist.

Not saying this is your view, but it amazes me how many people think companies should be able to write anything they like in terms of service and/or that “they wouldn’t be profitable if they weren’t allowed to do bad things” is a good reason not to ban companies from doing bad things.