This isn't anti-competitive. This is Craigslist saying, "go across the street and build your company on your own merits, not our captive audience". If Padmapper is that great, and I believe they are, then they will have no problem building up their own user base. They just happened to lose their shortcut.
The ratio of revenue/visits/whatever metric craigslist has made in the last decade relative to their work is astronomical. They initially may have done hard work, but for most of their existence they have been reaping the continued benefits of winning a lottery 15 years ago. They have engaged in near zero innovation since securing a near-monopoly on online classifieds.
> If Padmapper is that great, and I believe they are, then they will have no problem building up their own user base.
Not necessary true. Craigslist is in a two-sided market, which favors the emergence of a monopoly. Padmapper currently makes the process of finding an apartment easier. The sister site Padlister is working on making offering easier, but the benefits are very small compared to what Padmapper offers renters.
Eventually, Padmapper could displace craigslist, but its going to be a very long process. In the meantime apartment hunters suffer by having to utilize a significantly less efficient UI.
Scaling mostly-static content with zero page customization is not rocket science anymore. Just ask anyone in the porn biz.
The analogy fails in two respects: 1) Padmapper doesn't make money off of Craigslist listings. 2) Padmapper shows facts about the listing, not the CL listing itself, and it links back to the original listing. If that's considered 'selling burgers inside of McD', then Google is also 'selling burgers inside of McD'.
The difference between the two situations are that in one case, there's only one place content is posted (padmapper/CL case). In the other case, content is posted to a lot of different places (google/web).
If history were different, and most content were hosted on AOL/Geocities, and Google was doing the same thing it's doing now, would you make the same argument for AOL/Geocities that you would for CL?