Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
I think the reason people here feel this way is because the general consensus among HN users is that the best product wins and that's all that matters. If a company has a monopoly on data and refuses to provide an API they're saying that they don't want to compete on the quality of their product (craigslist for example) they want to keep their position without the benefits to the users.Padmapper made craigslist apartment searches much better, instead of making their own apartment searches better craigslist shut Padmapper's access to craigslist data down. It shows that they value their own business more than they value the experience of their users, which to a lot of people here isn't exactly "good".Companies are free to do with their data whatever they want and they're free to restrict access to it however they like, sure, but it's still lame when a company does it because they don't want to improve their product and don't like competition.