Alexa Mashing Statsaholic - Why?

On a very slow day I finally found a very interesting story about the lawsuit against Statsaholic by Alexa. Alexa is suing Ron Hornbaker the developer of Statsaholic over the domain name Alexaholic, which was Hornbaker's original domain for the feature filled ranking site.

The depth of the story was reported by TechCrunch back in March, but essentially Statsaholic began to gain popularity because of their features, but changed their name and stopped using the conflicting Alexaholic domain to appease Amazon. Amazon got the lawyers involved and also blocked Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs even though other similar sites were still allowed access. This unprompted move effectively crippled Statsaholic.  

The simple evident fact is that Hornbaker changed the name at the request of Alexa, and shut down the domain until things could be sorted out. Meanwhile Alex began to implement many of Statsaholic's innovative and successful features, and eventually turned off all capability to hot link to any Alexa graphs from offsite.

Obviously, Statsaholic had put a dent in Alexa's armor when people began to migrate to the new stat site. What brought my renewed attention to the story was a post by Mashable today calling for a petition to halt the legal proceedings. Pete Cashmore thinks the gravity of the suit is excessive and unnecessary, because of the relative harm already done to Hornbaker and Statsaholic's prior cooperation. The obvious cooperation in righting the situation by Hornbaker even before any legal action was taken really frames the whole situation in my view.

The situation has effectively crippled Statsaholic and the damages sought are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This will essentially pound Hornbaker and Statsaholic into dust. Besides Web 2.0 losing a really innovative and effective tool, Alexa would essentially be getting away with startup competition murder.

The irony of the whole situation is that Amazon has been wooing small developers at the Web 2.0 Expo for the last few days, lauding their openness to APIs and trying to share the very thing they have denied others. You know we call for ethics and fairness in every corner of Web 2.0, yet the companies that benefit from people's participation cannot seem to play fairly. Where is the connectedness in these dealings and what about an example to follow from one of the big players?