No, things can change but we programmers tend to see everything as a technical problem, and assume that if only we can find a good technical solution we can fix it. But the problem isn’t technical – the APIs were shut down because consumer tech is governed by ads, which are not part of APIs (or would be trivial to remove). You have surely noticed that APIs are alive and well in enterprise, why? Because they have customers who pay money, and API access does not generally break their revenue stream (although even there some are skittish). As mere ”users” our economic function in consumer tech is to provide data and impressions to advertisers. Thy shall not bypass their sidebar, where the ads must be seen.
Nowadays the shutdown is not just of APIs but even anti-scraping, login walls, paywalls, fingerprinting, and so on and so forth. It’s a much more adversarial landscape today than during Web 2.0. When they threw copyright in the trash with the fair use loophole for AI, that obviously causes even more content lockdown panic. And in the midst of this giant data Mexican standoff, people are gonna take down their guns and see the light because of a new meta—API protocol?
Nowadays the shutdown is not just of APIs but even anti-scraping, login walls, paywalls, fingerprinting, and so on and so forth. It’s a much more adversarial landscape today than during Web 2.0. When they threw copyright in the trash with the fair use loophole for AI, that obviously causes even more content lockdown panic. And in the midst of this giant data Mexican standoff, people are gonna take down their guns and see the light because of a new meta—API protocol?