Who built the API and who pays to maintain it? These are not public goods in the traditional sense. The incentives must align or else the benefit is only maintained through benign neglect.
Fact is if you expose an API publicly, at that boundary you [should] lose the right to control what software interacts with it. Web browsers are called user agents for a reason.
If a service is valuable, people will pay for it directly and more than cover the cost of hosting an API. If a company can’t make money without hijacking people’s attention and tricking them into doing things that profit them by controlling the software running on their users’ computers then maybe it shouldn’t exist.
Not saying this is your view, but it amazes me how many people think companies should be able to write anything they like in terms of service and/or that “they wouldn’t be profitable if they weren’t allowed to do bad things” is a good reason not to ban companies from doing bad things.