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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

What prevents Verizon from donating the Yahoo Groups database to the Internet Archive? What does Verizon have to gain from preventing the archival of Yahoo Groups?

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Companies don't typically operate that way. All else being equal (especially when there's no $$$ in it for them) when given the choice between doing something and doing nothing, they usually choose to do nothing. It's often not malicious, but an overabundance of caution. (i.e. lawyers raising red flags about liability, 'our IP' etc... it's a real pain even from the inside getting large companies to do anything different from the status quo)

My bet would be that Verizon's network monitoring system/team sees the archive team's attempts as some sort of anomaly to be stopped. It's possible, though I wouldn't bet on it given Verizon's history re: public relations, that making noise might alter the equation and get them to allow the archive team to continue.

It is kind of incredible that they are expecting to be protected by IP laws, and yet aren't willing to put the slightest effort to archive the content that they are taking down...

Maybe those who care (we?) could organize a campaign to get customers to commit to leaving Verizon if they let the messages be deleted without archive? That would convert it into the language they understand.

To raise the perceived threat level, many folks could support in building tooling or docs to help ppl migrate as easily and streamlined as possible, to minimize the tax on consumer time that they rely on. (E.g., help on comparable plans, cheat sheet for call centre keywords, etc.)

Maybe something team "Do Not Pay" could help run with...! [1]

[1]: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/28/parking-tickets-plus-plus....

There is a campaign already. https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/

Oh God, I'm that guy. I'd been following this elsewhere, so didn't actually expect I'd get new info from the link itself :/ [opens mouth, inserts foot]

It's simply way too much work. Dying projects generating no revenues don't get the luxury of having tens of people assigned to work on them.

How is it too much work to tar up that shit, put it on a big ass drive or two, and ship it to them? I can't imagine it's that hard.

Probably a few minutes, and then 4 million lawyer hours for review.

`rm -rf /` is objectively free from Verizon's perspective.

Paying lawyers to examine the fine details and determine what liability may arise from publishing a database dump or the software that can view the dump's contents is not free.

You mean, "tar up" multiple databases across possibly multiple data centers + all related files uploaded to those groups (also possibly spread across multiple datacenters) while preserving full integrity and making sure that there's accompanying documentation on how to set all this up and run?

You tell me how much work it would be.

Compared that too pulling the plug and getting servers over to a landfill.

I can imagine it's easier and safer (from a legal perspective) to just delete the data and therefore no longer be responsible for the content. Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR.

I mean, the GDPR makes things kind of difficult in this regard, and I suspect even archives are liable if somebody takes an issue with content they are hosting.

That doesn’t sound correct, given they GDPR doesn’t generally apply to archival products.

Why not? According to GDPR someone can show up and request (1) fixing personal data (PII) like nickname - this is data accuracy requirement, in fact, according to GDPR Yahoo should do the data accuracy check (for instance send a reminder to the user to check data). (2) Someone can file data portability request, Yahoo needs to provide this. (3) Some can request data removal. (4) Yahoo has to managed user consents for anything they do with those data.

For a product that does not bring any revenue or significant revenue, it is better to dump everything and simply don't be associated with data any longer.

That's the side effect of GDPR, it is hard from the technical and financial perspective to maintain anything free on the Internet that keeps user's data.

GDPR has an actual archive exception to the "right to be forgotten", art. 17, §3d [0]. IANAL, so I don't want to say if it covers this archival, but I would hope so.

0: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

Anything being archived by archive.org is pretty clearly being done in the public interest. If it was something like Equifax archiving the data to use as a factor in people's credit scores then it would be much more ambiguous.

This seems relatively cheap to fix. Spin off Yahoo Groups as a new corporation, and have that corporation subsequently donate all its assets. If the corporation somehow manages to get sued, it doesn't really matter, since it has no assets.

Or spin it off and sell it.

No non-privately owned company would ever willingly put itself through the legal and tax requirements for spinning off a new company with part of its assets just to do the right, non-profitable thing, with those assets.

Also, in my opinion, no privately owned company either, unless the owner was soon dying of something and wanted to get in good with their creator.

I’d assume the law is smarter than this, because companies would otherwise continually spin of new corporations to get rid of their liabilities with no assets as a sort of lightning rod for lawsuits.

This is, iiuc, how the movie and construction industries work. Spin up a minicorp for every big risky project to shield the mother ship.

When you create the SPV in advance, it's very clear what part of the work done by the organization attaches to it (because the organization ensures that all its processes explicitly specify the legal compartment they're running under.)

When you create an SPV after-the-fact, you have to go back and reverse-engineer a separation of liabilities from documents that don't specify whether they're work done for the organization or the SPV (because the SPV didn't exist.)

It's like a divorce. (Or, for an even more on-the-nose analogy, it's like trying to use a condom after-the-fact by extracting any bodily contamination and putting it in the condom.)

They do it regularly. Lead in gasoline (ethyl corp), asbestos.

If Yahoo Groups has a GDPR obligation now (and it's not clear that they do) they don't erase obligation that by spinning up a different company and dumping all this personal data into that new company - that would be its own GDPR breach.

> Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR.

So, by analogy, if Twitter did allow people to download an archive of any public Twitter account's history... what would the GDPR require them to do? Wrap those archives in some sort of auto-expiring DRM?

One of Verizon's spokespeople was literally Darth Vader. "Ma Bell has you by the calls".

Large corporations are not anthropomorphic entities, regardless of their disarming branding. Rather they are amoral bureaucracies, likely administered by people who have learned to ignore their empathy to get there. Verizon won't change course to accommodate the Internet Archive or general Internet community any more than a combine would pause for a field mouse.

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