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> it would ban any form of scraping

...which many entities would love to do. If it were illegal to extract data any way but through an official API, with a TOS and fees and everything, that would make a bunch of dying business models so much more viable.

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And kill Google Search. Google can't afford for that precedent to exist.

It already exists and it's used to kill startups every day (including mine). Google gets a pass because they're real special. See Perfect 10 v. Amazon.

Google can afford to legislate a carve-out.

afaik it is against Google TOS to scrape data from their services e.g. play store but I can't find the evidence now. Some mobile store analytics agencies do it very carefully seizing the risk of their google account being banned forever. Haven't heard the precedents, still.

ToS aren't laws.

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