The thesis of this article seems to be that by sending C&Ds to companies that are scraping their website and using the data for profit, Craigslist is "squashing

The thesis of this article seems to be that by sending C&Ds to companies that are scraping their website and using the data for profit, Craigslist is "squashing innovation". This seems crazy. Is the underlying idea that companies scraping Craiglist are like Google crawling the web -- making use of public data? Because Google links back to the source of the data; these companies (mostly) do not. While I accept that Craigslist has solid network effects going for it that make it hard to compete even with better UI, I don't think you get to go whining to the tech press about the fact that there are natural barriers to entry in your market. Far from "squashing innovation", Craigslist is doing almost nothing to defend its market share.