Somewhere a virtual door creaks in misty, looming, darkness. A fax machine tap-taps a tattoo on a rotted window frame. Despite the name, the Haunting of GeoCities is not a ghost story, tall tale, or urban legend. It was a real 1999 episode, now consigned to the annals of early internet history.
First, what was GeoCities? It was, at one time, the third most visited site on the internet. It is hard to get a grasp of the DIY “building’ and “personalization” element of the early web today, so we’re not going to do it. But think California, skater culture, surfing, 90s pop music, fashion, and mix it all together. This was “user generated content,” before those terms even began to gain traction.
What triggered the haunting?
Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 and introduced new Terms of Service. The result was one of the most notable boycotts in Web history. GeoCities was huge. Yahoo paid US$3.6 billion in cash plus at least US$1 billion in stock options.
The dispute centered on Section 8 of the new terms. Read plainly, it seemed to let Yahoo use anything uploaded to GeoCities servers without paying royalties, giving credit, or notifying the creator. Users couldn’t avoid it. When they logged in on 28 June 1999, they had to accept the new terms before they could reach their own pages. Aside: Yes, we see how this ties in to vendor lock-in practices in IoT.
How the “haunting” worked
Users, known as “homesteaders,” emptied their pages of content. They swapped bright colors and blinking GIFs for plain grey and excerpts from the Terms of Service. The aim was to turn busy GeoCities “neighborhoods” into ghost towns. The message to Yahoo was direct: if you care so much about new terms, you can have them, … repeated across GeoCities pages, while the real content moved somewhere else.
“We don’t want your content. The wording was just badly chosen.”
Yahoo’s main spokesperson was executive Tim Brady. He said the company had no plan to take people’s work or profit from the hours they had spent building their pages. He described the fix as clarifying the terms so they better reflected what Yahoo actually intended. He also pointed to self-interest. He told the Los Angeles Times that trust is fragile and that users would leave immediately if Yahoo did anything of the sort.
How it ended
Yahoo’s first revision was cosmetic. Critics noted it left the “sublicensable” clause untouched, so Yahoo could still sell the content rights to third parties. The protest kept growing and reached television, including interviews on CNBC and Fox News. Yahoo backed down and released final terms on 6 July 1999. The new terms simplified the language, dropped the sublicensing clause entirely, and explicitly limited Yahoo’s control over user content. One of Yahoo’s own executives summed up its position: “If [homesteaders] don’t publish, we don’t have anything to sell”.
Of course it matters today
The effects reached beyond GeoCities. During the boycott, rival host Tripod quietly narrowed its own content license. When Microsoft launched its homepage builder later that year, it said it was reviewing its terms “in light of what happened with Yahoo.” Researchers CJ Reynolds and Blake Hallinan use the episode to illustrate what they call “antagonistic use,” a way of interacting with a platform that falls between simply using it and leaving it.
Today, Yahoo is an early web company that still haunts the internet. It ended as an independent company in 2017, when Verizon closed its $4.48 billion purchase of Yahoo’s core business. Today, Apollo, a private equity firm, holds 90% and Verizon keeps the other 10%. The CEO is Jim Lanzone, who previously ran Ask Jeeves, CBS Interactive, and Tinder, joining in 2021 to lead the latest return from the crypt. Yahoo!
