[zoogeny]

> OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost.

Implicitly he is also arguing that it must exist at all.

But let's consider further your own commercial clause. Apple has a discussion board for their support community [1] - and now we are mandating that Apple must both have an API for users to access it and must only charge cost. Who gets to determine the cost? Is it hardware costs? Does it include R&D? Is there a fixed margin set by a regulator?

The grey area on this is as wide as an ocean. But I do think it is a little funny that people are arguing about this like it is equivalent to a universal human right.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/

[derefr]

A server-rendered HTML website is an API. If said HTML website is unauthenticated and freely accessible by any user-agent, then it's a de-facto public API, too. This is the case for the Apple discussion boards. You don't have to authenticate with their backend before scraping anything you'd like off of the site. You can build third-party tools to read or even interact with this site, by scraping the HTML.

This thing with Reddit is only the big deal that it is, because Reddit's backend blocks "app" user-agents from simply scraping pages from the non-authenticated Reddit HTML website. (If this wasn't true, they'd just do that, and none of this would be an issue.) But these third-party UAs are instead forced to go through the authenticated data API — where they can then be API-credit-limited and forced into paid data-API subscription plans.

[cal85]

I think a more reasonable argument could be “If a site provides an API for fetching user-generated content, it should be free”. (But just as a moral argument, not something to be enforced with regulations.) The issue is that if they provide a paid API for users’ content, they acknowledge the value in the content provided by their users (whom they already have to thank for all their ad revenue), so it seems unjust for them to suddenly start selling that content, especially without sharing the API revenue with the content creators or something.