We don't owe them anything either, and yet computer crimes laws make it illegal to circumvent any technical measures they put in place to stop competitors from

We don't owe them anything either, and yet computer crimes laws make it illegal to circumvent any technical measures they put in place to stop competitors from getting information they make public on the site. I think less people would be concerned about the issue if it was just Craigslist putting up technical measures (e.g. blocking API access) to competitors, but competitors were free to rent VPSes or pay people for use of their IP address to access the data for scraping. If there was no law against scraping information from websites that is available to arbitrary members of the public (provided that you comply with copyright laws post-scraping), then there would be no issue. So the real issue is not that Craigslist owes anyone anything, but rather, that the government is enforcing laws on their behalf to entrench the network effects of existing businesses against new entrants to the market.