I think everyone understands that corporations don't want to spend money and effort maintaining servers that don't generate revenue. No one is really surprised

I think everyone understands that corporations don't want to spend money and effort maintaining servers that don't generate revenue. No one is really surprised that they won't help with archive efforts. The question is why they're spending real effort on blocking archivists. All they had to do was keep doing nothing for a few days. The cost to them might have been a couple hundred dollars' worth of bandwidth, at most, which I think archivists would have been happy to pay--they've done more before. (That's estimating based on small-scale commercial hosting prices; it might not even register on whatever enterprise uplink Yahoo/Verizon uses.) Instead they've got at least one professional taking time away from productive work to fuck with archivists at no benefit to anyone. It's possible that the wage-hours spent on this actually exceed what the bandwidth costs would have been. It's astonishingly petty.