It's hard to believe that an archive of sites meant to be consumed on dial-up modems, most abandoned, would today require particularly high bandwidth costs. Ya

It's hard to believe that an archive of sites meant to be consumed on dial-up modems, most abandoned, would today require particularly high bandwidth costs. Yahoo has been faltering for a long time, but it's still worth tens of billions of dollars. So yes, I think they should have kept a (read-only) archive running forever, despite not making any money from it, as an act of good internet citizenship with respect to such a historically important website - or at the very least not have forced the Internet Archive to race to manually crawl as much as possible before the deadline. edit: As a general note, this is IMO one of the fundamental technical deficiencies of the Web today. Keeping website information around shouldn't require active maintenance by the publisher. Imagine if everyone could no longer read the contents of a book once the publisher stopped printing it - what that would do to our access to historical culture? In an era where most users have abundant storage at least by the standards of text, it wouldn't be that hard to invent a protocol where visitors to websites automatically mirror them (the text at least) and mirror them to other clients, forming a decentralized filesystem. Compared to this, the WayBackMachine is an impressive effort, but it's limited by its centralized nature, managed by a single, relatively small non-profit organization.