( CNN ) -- Twitter users are rightly aghast that the company on Sunday banned a user for openly criticizing NBC 's coverage of the Olympics . After Guy Adams , a British newspaper reporter for The Independent , posted negative comments about NBC 's tape-delayed Olympics coverage ( including one executive 's work e-mail for viewers to make complaints ) , Twitter alerted its business partner -- NBC -- and showed the network how to file a complaint capable of shutting down the offending user . Both Twitter and NBC apologized Tuesday , and Twitter restored Adams ' account . Yes , the Twitterverse should be appalled , but we should not be surprised . First off , Twitter is a private , for-profit company . Having provided a free service to millions of Internet users for years , the company is attempting to placate and even pay back investors who have been awaiting returns on millions of venture dollars . This means becoming more restrictive , more top-down and more corporate . Last month , in an effort to raise advertising revenue , the company announced it was closing its API ( application program interface ) to third-party apps -- meaning people and companies can no longer make applications that stream Twitter data . This makes it harder to see Tweets from places other than Twitter 's own website . It 's an entirely less open service this way , but it also gives Twitter exclusive control over how and where people access its content -- and advertisements . And now , as if to prove that it 's more of a corporate player than a tool for corporate critique and other radical activity , Twitter has given its biggest partners a primer in how to ban users that offend them : Simply ask us . Tech : Welcome to the Twitter Olympics . So is the Net suddenly less free and open ? No . The Net -- at least as a technology -- is just as free as it was before . This is simply what happens when we rely on a highly centralized and privately owned tool for a capability that might best be accomplished through a more distributed technology . The Net might be a big decentralized network , but Twitter is a single , centralized node on that network . Our tweets do n't self-replicate and spread ; they go to Twitter , which then essentially broadcasts them to our followers . This is an efficient system , for sure , but it is also highly controllable . The extent to which our messages proliferate depends entirely on the kindness of Twitter , a company that has priorities other than us . The alternative would be to sidestep Twitter altogether , and re-create its functionality through less restrictive , distributed tools . We could use the messaging equivalent of Napster or Tor -- the peer-to-peer networks that let people share music and movies with each other . Instead of downloading files from a central server , people get bits and pieces of files from one another . Likewise , e-mail travels sideways from server to server , in bits and pieces , with no truly central administrator motivated to ban a particular user for what he 's writing . We may not like Twitter for what it 's doing , but it 's not up to a multimillion-dollar corporation to act against its own short-term financial interests in favor of freedom of our speech . Tech : Meet the man who started # NBCFail . It is , however , up to those of us who want a free and open Internet to make the effort to understand how our technologies work and who controls them . Only then will we be capable of exploring alternatives to centralized corporate software , and of building and supporting them . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Douglas Rushkoff .
David Rushkoff : Twitter users affected by loss of reporter 's access after anti - NBC tweets . Rushkoff : It 's no surprise -- Twitter a company with concerns besides users . He says it sends message to corporate partners : show us how to help users that offend . Rushkoff : Users who do n't want to depend on us should explore and/or build alternatives .