Comment by tomaszs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomaszs | Hacker News Reader

Personally i think API should be obligatory. Every company should provide it with respect for private data. Additionaly if a company does not have it, it should be prohibited to block automatic measures to process the system and data.

There should be a pricing model to cover basic expenses made by the API usage.

Maybe you wonder why on earth it should be legally allowed to process automatically system data?

We have a lots of great services online. But we can not move further, integrate them into even better ones, because of lack of APIs and bot bans.

Without it, we wont be able to create high level services people expect. And currently if these will be provided, than only by companies that have Monopoly over vast parts of online offering. Because they can make more monopolistic deals with service providers.

Another problem is that service owners have adventage over users. Because they can process users data to drive business decisions torwards them. But users can not process thr same data for their adventage. With more and more complicated systems user ends up being dependant on the company service and has no possibility of validation.

And this means even more trouble than we have today. So ye, open programmatic access as a human right.

Does "every company" include the thousands of local businesses running Woocommerce or Shopify?

Larger companies love regulations like this because they can afford it, and it keeps smaller competitors from ever growing to be a threat.

I'm not saying they should be able to do whatever with data - but for such providers, manually replying to an email is preferable than implementing a complicated technical solution they can't understand (and will often likely mis-configure, exposing your data) when they just want to sell hats.

Clearly if this regulation existed companies like the ones you mention would include an API as part of their offering.

I'd weigh that up against the very real risk it is mis-configured by someone's nephew and exposes my private data to anyone who asks.

I think mandating API for certain industries like banking is a good idea, but I'm not so supportive of having it apply all the way down to my local hair salon. They have enough to worry about.

That's fine. The second point was precisely that if the company doesn't want to provide an API, fine; but they then don't get to try and stop people from scraping it instead. And I agree with my sibling comment; Woocommerce or Shopify or whatever just build it in like everything else they provide.

Agree re: scraping, I was more stuck on "obligatory" so I guess I glossed over that.

I also agree that the big players would roll it into their core offering which would make life easier, but I'm wary of monocultures. A lot of people are already a bit annoyed at how much Wordpress is out there and this would just be another reason to skip a smaller (or bespoke) alternative and raise the barrier of entry for anyone thinking of making an alternative. But if we're agreeing that no one is forced to do it and scraping is OK, that's fine.

of course, I think everyone here would agree it's always good to have an API... too bad you're not gonna succeed in pushing this "rule" out, especially scraping stuff...bot bans are in part because it's rather easy to overload the system with bot calls, which, since they use same page as users, will also affect normal users...especially taxing if the page is dynamic with server-side stuff, like maybe some aspx or php page, which at best would just hog the system resources, at worst could possibly break altogether (most likely due to no free ram), etc... I'm no expert tho, so these specifics might be wrong...

LinkedIn would like to have a word with you.

LinkedIn is a worked example of why we need such a law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com