[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.