Regulation, privacy, consent, surveillance, sovereignty, antitrust — the political dimension of APIs that most people skip.
The Supreme Court's 2021 decision in Google v. Oracle found Google's reimplementation of the Java API to be fair use — protecting the freedom to build compatible systems, without settling every underlying question.
The best ones are genuinely excellent and the average is poor — and the difference is almost always sustained funding and a named owner rather than technology or intent.
Often yes — but assume the terms will change. Read them, know your migration path, avoid depending on a single provider for anything existential, and price the dependency honestly.
Almost nothing, on its own. It might mean publicly documented, freely accessible, openly licensed, or merely "we have an API." Ask which one they mean, because the differences are the whole story.
Open banking regimes (PSD2, the UK CMA order, Australia's CDR, the US §1033 rules) and healthcare interoperability rules (the Cures Act, CMS rules) are the clearest cases — regulation has become one of the strongest d...
Because publishing a dataset is not the same as sustaining a usable service. Most open data shipped without APIs, ownership, quality commitments, or a plan for who maintains it in year three.
Usually because the ecosystem they invited in started competing with them, or because the data became more valuable sold than shared. The pattern is old and remarkably consistent.
Because an API is a power relationship encoded as a technical interface. It decides who can access what, on whose terms, with what recourse — and those have never been engineering questions.
