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If you read the article and not just the headline, the author is in favor of charging a cost based fee for API access. A fee that would cover hosting and serving the API, but not generate profit for the parent company benefiting from the 3P users' content.

There would be no benefit to providing it, then.

No first-order benefit, perhaps.

It shouldn't be difficult to look to second- and third-order benefits, though, such as increasing your user base and the amount of generated content.

That makes sense.

I have a theory that governments and corporations across the world are pushing hard for free APIs. If they cost anything, even very little, then it makes astroturfing too expensive.

Read the footnote.