Who Pays in an Open API 2.0 World

Reminds me of early search syndication services... From Web 2.0 Bay CHI session last night, discussion about who pays/who profits from an Open API 2.0 World. I see this as a bigger and bigger issue, as many people think it's great for the consumer, but this ain't communism : "Jonathan Boutelle brings up an interesting point after attending the BayCHI Web2.0 panel the other day: the Web 2.0 companies heavily promoting their APIs (Technorati, Flickr, Google) are glad to have developers create interesting new interfaces out of them…unless you want to make money from that interface. This discussion is just the tip of the iceberg. Think about this for a second. These companies are all testing the waters here in Web 2.0 world. They’re creating, maintaining, and optimizing their APIs for usefulness, while promoting developer adoption as fast as they can. Technorati is pushing tags, Flickr is pushing photo sharing, and Google is pushing maps. Developers, curious to know what they can create with these APIs, are making cool things such as Housingmaps.com and the Flickr tag browser. Interestingly, not all companies ask for part of the pie in the same way. Amazon, for example, actually pays for developers to use their APIs by giving them referral fees for any products bought."