> Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..]

I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.

I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising.

But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.

> you'd be bypassing their advertising.

Right.

So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?

I wouldn't say that it's necessarily 'wrong', but I do think it's a bad decision. The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them and generate bad will towards Twitter.

In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.

> The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them [..]

Yup, although we all know that Twitter just the latest example in a loooong line of companies to have pulled this stunt since, well, what feels like forever.

> and generate bad will towards Twitter

I'm fairly ambivalent about this aspect, and I doubt Musk cares much, it's not as though the haters weren't already hating before this latest incident.