Even if Yahoo! was justified in taking down my old blog Texas Scribbler dot com, they had no right to steal it. I paid them every month to host it on the Web. Every month for seven years. I’m still paying them and will until I’m absolutely sure they won’t return my property.
The latest word from their low-level techs at Small Business Support is that Yahoo!’s engineering staff has my case under “further review.” They have no right to do that, either. If I was willing to pay some lawyer an open-ended amount of legal fees—at some ridiculous hourly rate—I could sue their fat California asses off.
But I’m not stupid. The only people who win lawsuits are lawyers.
The first tech I talked to, for an hour on Nov. 28, while other people were enjoying Thanksgiving, told me Yahoo!’s excuse for “deactivating” my blog the day before was that I had not signed off on the latest change in their terms of service. Very similar to what happened to this pediatrician. (He eventually got his site back, but not before a disruption in his business affairs for which, as you will see if you follow the link, he’s still angry.)
Yahoo! avers that I was notified to sign. I saw nothing. Even if their email went into my spam filter, I always check the spam before deleting it. There was nothing from them warning me to sign or they would steal my property. Nothing at all.
They have likewise stolen my domain name, which was registered with them. They had passed it on to an Australian firm for, what?, safekeeping? I was notified on Nov. 29 by the Aussie firm and Yahoo! that Yahoo! has reclaimed possession of my domain name. So they have stolen that, too.
I’m dealing with a criminal enterprise here disguised as a reputable international corporation. If that was not so Yahoo! would have notified me by now that, because I allegedly failed to sign their new terms of service, I had 24 hours to move my blog to someone else’s server and, oh, by the way, my domain name registration as well.
Instead, five days after they stole my property, my case is under “further review.” A pox on your house, Yahoo! So good of you to have already supplied the exclamation point. As my blog friend Akaky says, Johnathan Swift, who knew a Yahoo when he saw one, would have understood.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 