What is the game theory here? Twitter cooperates and OpenAI defects, and we call that a win?
It doesn't have to be one company controlling who gets access, the users can decide this
In this sense we have this intractable push and pull going on with just about any community of sufficient size. We have the users who might want or should want some privacy and respect and other such benefits, and then we have the people who actually invest and build these platforms, who are incentivized to deliver other things than what the users best interest might be. Either you empower users to have more money to be able to roll their own solutions, or you try and set up a world where the incentives of capital perfectly match the needs of the individual or collective of individuals, which is probably impossible to do.
If companies making billions isn't the part that's problematic, the billions part can be left out, and the real problem can be discussed instead.
People pirate software, yet people still develop and sell it.
Yes, it's not the most profitable thing done alone. Only for those who find the nice combination or feedback loop of 'fit', demand, improvement, and expansion.
If you can make billions off the thing, you can presumably handle some GeoIP/rate limiting... or simply, not caring. Anything that falls through the cracks is categorically insignificant to your grand nature.
To justify it, if one must, consider it a trial. As your friendly neighborhood dealer would say: "The first taste is free".
No other social media site (besides Reddit) had one. Facebook kind of tried, although theirs was always a lot more limited, and got shut down when it turned out Cambridge Analytica used it for widespread election fraud[1].
Both Twitter and Reddit did basically the same thing at roughly the same time, Twitter just had the misfortune to be under the control of Elon Musk, so the move was perceived as ideological.
[1] As it later turned out, Cambridge Analytica was basically a "nothing burger", they claimed to be able to accomplish a lot while, in reality, accomplishing very little. The damage to interoperability was already done, though.
What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information.
(I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).
That sentiment goes back pretty far in Facebook's history
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-branded-early-fac...
For those unaware, Mastodon's APIs are extremely open and it's very easy to scrape, to the point of providing you with a "firehose" of all public posts that an instance sees, both local and federated, with no authentication required. They also have an extreme anti-scraping culture, anybody who admits to running any kind of scraper which is not strictly opt-in, even for benign / scientific purposes, is very quickly shunned and blocked. Most instances also have a "disallow scraping via robots.txt" policy by default.
The results? I posted a canary token[1] link on a medium-sized, well-federated, well-protected instance which disallows scraping, and it got hit by some shady social media crawler in a fraction of a second. It started getting hit by many other strange crawlers later on, and it still keeps getting visits (mostly from Google now).
And I don't know what to tell them, because that's not how the internet has ever worked.
1. Experts can comment, but I think the value of multi person conversational data from forums is uniquely valuable and in short supply relative to just blogposts/news stories on the internet.
2. The absolute economic value of the entire corpus of Twitter is much more valuable than any single boatforum.com like website. So Twitter has a much more incentive to lock itself down than boatforum.com.
That was was the story spread far and wide by the Apollo app developer that was believed by the gullible and angry Reddit masses.
But Reddit actually set a reasonable API price, as evidenced by the fact that a year and a half later there are still five 3rd party apps running on reasonable subscriptions:
Infinity For Reddit
Nara For Reddit
Narwhal 2
Now for Reddit
Relay For Reddit