What is an API, can we redefine?

a company said, "you can't mess with our services directly, but we'll give you a way to interact with our services and (mostly) data over HTTP. basically, SOAP is terrible, and this is just like HTTP but we give you a structured response in JSON."

and then technical strategy said, "yes, and we can dissuade people competing with us by getting them excited to use the data."

then the marketing team said, "we can really improve ROI if we siphon out user data to improve our business intelligence."

and then the user lost, competition squandered, app developers won, big biz wins. am i getting this right? is this what an API is?

can we think of a better name? i really don't want to build an API if this is what this is. right now i've just got, "structured HTTP query".