There's a pretty basic feeling I have that if as a user you can browse & get data from a site, you should be the ability to get that same data in more direct us

There's a pretty basic feeling I have that if as a user you can browse & get data from a site, you should be the ability to get that same data in more direct useful & unencumbered form. The thing is, anyone doing shady things probably already has complex ways of scraping & extracting data they want anyways. The only people this walled gardening hurts are good everyday users, are citizens. Worrying about "oh no what if we could easily get public data" feels like a way too conservative reaction that's not in touch with where we are already.