Used [fiddler][1] to double-check<sup>*</sup> this. Everything I get back from the API is definitely gzip compressed. For that matter, you can't get a response that isn't compressed; you can only choose between gzip & deflate. Default is gzip. The API always sets the `Content-Encoding` response header, so you might be the victim of your library decompressing the response for you. <sub>*Triple-checked: I ran our test cases without setting `Accept-Encoding` but leaving the gzip decompression code in.</sub> --- Bare minimum request using the world's worst stackoverflow clone (w/ gzip off): Header: GET http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.8/users/242897/comments/160173?sort=votes&order=desc&page=1&pagesize=30&key=iv1qWOxcwkaKg53RJIXh-A HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: WorldsWorstStackOverflowClone Host: api.stackoverflow.com Connection: Keep-Alive Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:44:21 GMT Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: private Content-Encoding: gzip X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0 X-RateLimit-Max: 10000 X-RateLimit-Current: 9473 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 Content-Length: 625 [gzip'd byte stream] [1]: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/