The Straw That Broke Yahoo!'s Back
Editor's note: This was sent over the Oligarchy's e-mail list in 2000.
As you can see, messages sent over the TRUE RELIGION mailing list (and all other eGroups lists) now feature banner ads on top of the message, rather than below it. This is the most visible effect of eGroups' buyout by Yahoo! (one of the three horsemen of the Internet apocalypse [1]). I have come to realize that we are entering a state of Cold War with Yahoo! -- nay, we have been in such a state for some time now, and just haven't noticed yet. Yahoo! has already purchased practically every aspect of The World Oligarchy's Internet influence.
It started with Yahoo!'s purchase of Geocities, which originally hosted two of our mirror websites. Some of you may remember the fiasco last year when Geoshitties declared ownership of all content posted to websites they hosted.
I quickly moved the True Religion website (and rebuilt it in the process). I opened the new site at SimpleNet last October, only to witness Yahoo!'s purchase of SimpleNet earlier this year. (SimpleNet was a subsidiary of Broadcast.com, which merged with Yahoo!.) Then Yahoo! bought out eGroups about two months ago.
And then, of course, there's the matter of my own e-mail service -- which I only took up at Yahoo! to escape the intense evil of Microsoft Hotmail. (This was before Yahoo! was quite the scourge it is today).
And so now Yahoo! owns nearly every venue through which we spread our influence. I'll bet it's only a matter of time before they own EarthLink and Usenetserver.com. But yet, thus far they have escaped even being declared evil, let alone any sort of action.
This is changing now. Yahoo! is now officially an evil
company. While we will not be moving to other services
at this time (that's a lot of trouble, and besides,
they'd notice and immediately buy out the new
services), we will be keeping a close eye on their
actions. Yahoo!'s specific buyout of every
Oligarchy-related service cannot be a coincidence. An
invasion on the scale of last summer's AOL War is not
an option at this time, though the possibility is
ever-present. In the meantime, any intelligence on the
matter, including information on new buyouts, are
welcome and appreciated.
In closing, I would like to add that I spent too much time in the sun today and my lily-white ass is now burnt to a crisp. Fuck.
[1] The other two horsemen are, of course, Microsoft and AOL.