APIs are enablers of remix culture, essentially. And what they mix is structured data.

Because of all that, APIs have been seen, traditionally, as symbolic and practical. Sure, they're about creating products that people will like, and use, and find valuable—products, in other words, that will be monetizable. (Use Tweetdeck or Tweetbot? Those were built, originally, on the Twitter API.) But the interfaces, the mere fact of their existence, have also been about respecting, almost literally, the webbiness of the web—as a network. As an ecosystem. As a grand, crazy, nerdy collaboration.

So it's hard not to see the closure of the Netflix API, on top of the closure of all the other APIs, as symbolic in its own way—of a new era of the web that is less concerned with outreach, and more concerned with consolidation. A web controlled by companies that prefer their own way of doing things, without external input. A web that takes the productive enthusiasms of independent developers and says, essentially, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Many developers—most developers—have long adopted this more cynical view of the API. As the blog and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer put it in a 2012 blog post about changes to Twitter's API guidelines:

Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you’d be a fool to think they won’t do the same as Twitter has.

Netflix, according to its blog post on the API closure, is incorporating the products it likes into its service. It's abandoning the others. And you can't necessarily fault it for doing that. As Kin Lane points out on his blog API Evangelist, the applications that came out of Netflix's particular API program weren't, overall, that good. And there weren't that many of them trying to be good in the first place. That may be because Netflix deals with licensed content, as opposed to user-generated information.

But it may also be because the constant threat of a closed API—the constant threat of Netflix doing precisely what it has now done—has created just what you'd expect it to: a chilling effect. Products built on APIs are houses built on sand—specks controlled, in the end, by the whims of the larger company. A company that is free to tell you, with much finality but little apology, "Thank you to for participating in the ecosystem throughout the years."

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