My opinion is people are getting really quick at jumping on the bandwagon and lumping all this together. They are very different types of issues and impacts.
I believe weev got in legal trouble under the CFAA for this very thing with his 2010 AT&T escapade. AT&T had all that data sitting on a public server with no authentication necessary, just a SIM ID to get that customer's PII. Truthfully AT&T should have been hit with negligence...you don't secure a bank vault with a screen door, but we don't hold anyone accountable for other people's data in America.
If you want to make those laws sane, so be it; I hate them. But the only reason there's some pumped-up urgency right now is because rich people want to urgently do whatever the hell they urgently want to do.
People have gone to jail for using public APIs in a way they weren't intended to be used. Make it a big deal then.
at the very least, these corporations are essentially being subsidized by community-funded server capacity to make these requests. like other private corporate APIs, they should be charged per-request. until then, this kind of 'accidental' DDOSing should be made illegal and treated accordingly
coming to the defense of these companies just has the net effect of eroding public community projects, increasing their costs, and will push us even more into walled corporate gardens