> People are being paid to prevent people from accessing an API and people are being paid to defeat these countermeasures. This is similar to people being paid to dig holes and other people are being paid to fill in the holes

Let me tell you about this little thing called tax accountants and the IRS...

> I think the aliens would conclude there is something wrong with the economic system.

These aliens are unfamiliar with adversarial systems?

Reminds me a a SciFi short story I read once where some aliens came to earth. Everyone thought they were amazingly smart, but it turned out they had just been working on their tech for a lot longer and were very dumb. The protagonist in the story figured this out, and sold them the Brooklyn Bridge...