If you haven’t heard yet, Craigslist is apparently biased about who it gives its freely available information to.

The basic story: Romy Maxwell was building a mashup of Craigslist data that displayed listings on a map. The project, called Flippity, seems pretty cool. It’s non-commercial, and uses data that Craigslist publicly syndicates through its RSS feed. But apparently, as soon as Craigslist found out about it, they blocked the application, as well as any other applications built using Yahoo Pipes.

You can read the more about the story on Romy’s blog, and at Tech Crunch on the Washington Post.

Of course, a lot had has already been written about this.

Here’s my question:
What’s the point?

Craigslist doesn’t charge for the vast majority of their content. They generally allow anyone to use their RSS feed for non-commercial purposes. It seems to be in their economic interest to further syndicate their content so that more people are engaging with them and their brand.

So… why?

Any guesses?

This reminds me of another current, high-profile case of online protectionism. Murdoch’s ad judgement at least makes sense- he’s “Big Content,” steeped in the old way of doing things. But Craigslist is supposed to be a shining example of the new way of doing things. They give away a bunch of stuff, give everyone access to it for free, and then charge below market rates for the one small subset of their “product” (job listings in a few large metro areas), and they make a fortune.

So, what gives?