Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

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> since API clients are essentially renting the vendor's platform and launching businesses based on this, there needs to be some legally-enforced stability. I would like to see something like a landlord-tenant relationship.

Except when a tenant is kicked out of their apartment with no notice, they might literally die. When Routebuilder gets shut down (with at least 2 weeks notice if not more, according to the article), someone organizing a marathon might... have to use a different, also free service?

And let's not forget that Google is a private enterprise offering an absolutely insane amount of data and access for free. The bar for "legitimate reason" to revoke API access is (and should be) legally no higher than "Google wants to." They actually go quite a bit above and beyond by having Terms that you can read and that as far as I can tell they abide by.

>Except when a tenant is kicked out of their apartment with no notice, they might literally die. When Routebuilder gets shut down ...

The owner of Routebuilder loses income, gets evicted, and might literally die.

The impact might be small on Routebuilder's end users but destroying someone's business is destroying someone's business even if their business value was trivial.

>Except when a tenant is kicked out of their apartment with no notice, they might literally die.

I don't mean to equate becoming homeless with getting your business wrecked (though they're often connected), but I don't think there's an argument that something has to literally make someone homeless before it can be regulated. Stable business relationships are important.

>The bar for "legitimate reason" to revoke API access is (and should be) legally no higher than "Google wants to."

This would still be open to them in a lease situation; it would simply have to be planned and occur according to at least the law's minimum notice periods.

That's a little dramatic. Change the example of an apartment eviction is too distracting -- when I worked retail, vendors would lease end end caps.

If some jackass took the display down, an auditor would find it and we would get sued. The customer had recourse.

They're paying for the end caps. Routebuilder isn't paying for the Maps API.

A good legal situation might be separating the part of Google that provides services from the part that uses them.

The part of Google that uses the services provided by the Maps provider would have to play by the same terms as any competitor.

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