What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell. It may be true that craigslist dominates "classified ads" in a lot of markets, but there has been a constant chipping away at their marketshare by marketplaces unbundling various aspects of the service and doing it better. It's hard to believe, but prior to AirBnB & VRBO people used to actually go to the craigslist page for the city they were visiting and laboriously respond to classified ads. We're all better off that these companies were forced to innovate enough to gain marketshare, rather than just applying for read/write access on a glorified 1990s-era bulletin-board.
This graphic is out of date, and even just a cursory look at it reveals dozens of firms that are missing, but we should maybe be thankful that craigslist has decided to focus on a low-cost, low-revenue model for so long:
> What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell.
I don’t think so. For one thing, requiring established networks to be interoperable can enable other companies to create their own enhancements with additional features (e.g. 3Taps, PadMapper, MSN Messenger), so the original network is not the only game in town and is incentivized to innovate faster. For another thing, requiring open protocols does not mean the process needs to be slow; there are slow standards consortiums (e.g. W3C), and there are reasonably fast ones (e.g. WHATWG). I’m not even sure that a consortium would be required; perhaps a company can satisfy its interoperability requirement simply by documenting its API and authorizing competitors to use that API.
This graphic is out of date, and even just a cursory look at it reveals dozens of firms that are missing, but we should maybe be thankful that craigslist has decided to focus on a low-cost, low-revenue model for so long:
https://medium.com/@Mohsin585/unbundling-craigslist-eb592ff2...