Typically win-win situations don't involve threatening force (government) to get one side to comply. If Yahoo wants to deprecate the Flickr API, they are doing so because it is not a win for them.
Are developers willing to pay to keep the service running? If not, why should Yahoo be forced to?
What an incredible windfall to have your API declared a historic landmark. What kind of marketing opportunity would that present. Please. Even a marketing idiot could figure that one out. :-)
Dave, who cares if an API is a historic landmark or not? App developers certainly don't. Most devs view APIs primarily as functional objects (although yes there is an aesthetics to API design).
I think it's super weird for a government to mandate to another entity that it must maintain a piece of technology in perpetuity.
Besides, OSes aren't static anyway... Abandonware apps that depend on a static API are still going to bit-rot as new OS versions are released and fail to retain 100% backwards compatibility.
This just seems like a bad idea. I'm also still not clear on what the heart of the idea is. Is it to preserve the API itself as a work? Or is it to try and preserve the app ecosystem? Or is it to preserve a style of request?
I feel like if you really wanted to do this, the way the Internet deals with this is to come up with a common standard folks can adhere to, and then to lobby orgs to adopt that. Setting the Flickr API as a defacto standard (just for them) seems weird.