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.

Two reasons I can think of right away. There can have a policy (and people) to detect abuse and shut off bot accounts, this can even be a separate entity from Yahoo Groups. Second, there can be internal metrics tracking active users and viewed pages, to get down as low as possible before deletion. In both cases archive.org is ruining it for them.

<conspiracy tinfoil hat>

Is it possible that there may be some kind of political angle to all of this; that archiving this information for the future might allow someone to find out something that someone else doesn't want to come to light?

</conspiracy tinfoil hat>