I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest.
LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used to work at LinkedIn.
These companies have built their fortunes on the public Internet and now that they are successful they seek to not pay homage to the platform that give them their success. It's very clearly anti-competitive, and bad for users. LinkedIn should be forced to compete based upon the veracity and differentiation of their service, not because they have their users' public data held hostage from competitors.
LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used to work at LinkedIn.
These companies have built their fortunes on the public Internet and now that they are successful they seek to not pay homage to the platform that give them their success. It's very clearly anti-competitive, and bad for users. LinkedIn should be forced to compete based upon the veracity and differentiation of their service, not because they have their users' public data held hostage from competitors.