- They have a Twitter account?

- They use Twitter resources?

- They use Twitter's platform?

- If Twitter went down, they wouldn't be able to post their Tweet?

> It'd be the same as a web host prohibiting certain browsers, or trying to block you from publishing RSS.

You have a wild imagination.

Is that a good comparison though?? I mean, an API is a luxury if it’s exposed to the outside world for free, you’re still free to screen scrape Twitter. Or cross post your own feed to RSS. Twitter, like any company, isn’t obligated to facilitate programmatic access by third parties for free. Usually that kind of thing is done to build an ecosystem but obviously Twitter feels they get less value out of this deep access now than third party developers do. Not sure how this is anything like “a web host preventing you from publishing RSS”.

Huh? Publishing a website “on the open web” costs money. I pay Google to host my website. If I hosted it on my own machine I’d still pay domain registration and ISP fees plus electricity and hardware costs. It’s not totally indefensible for Twitter to charge a small fee for access, although I’m not sure it’s a good idea in this case.