But.. it's not illegal?

> somewhat, per things like the Americans with Disabilities Act

This is just not right at all. There is nothing in the Americans with Disabilities Act that make blocking scrapers illegal.

I think you mean you don't like the power imbalance of the large company taking away from smaller companies while using technological means to stop the same thing happening to them.

I don't like it either, but that doesn't magically make it is illegal. I'm not even sure it should be.

Retrieving, processing, and displaying information in a manner contrary to the wishes of the provider of that information is necessary for accessibility to disabled users. As a specific example, any attempt to block use of wget for scraping also blocks use of wget as part of a `wget | filter | text-to-speech` pipeline[0], and is thus a discrimination against blind or otherwise visually impaired users. The ADA is, as mentioned, only somewhat effective in prohibiting such things, though.

> it's not illegal

> that doesn't magically make it is illegal.

I don't think anyone is claiming that scraping itself actually is legally protected - I interpreted DigitalSea and harry8 as implying that it should be.

0: in either the shell sense or the workflow sense

This is not the case. Unfortunately (?) the ADA doesn't allows the disabled person to specify their own technology. If Google can reasonably say that speech to text works via a standard screenreader (which it does) then they are ok.

> The ADA is, as mentioned, only somewhat effective in prohibiting such things, though

Well that's not the intent of the ADA, so not really surprising.