"To shut off such an important asset in the history of Web 2.0 really means they’ll pull the plug on anything."
I wonder if we'll ever see "historic districts" on the web in some form. I can't come up with any idea of how it would work, but I'll be fascinated to see how historians deal with the ephemeral nature of web content.
It's already happening. You can download all of geocities if you like, for example.
As technology advances the cost of keeping around old content gets cheaper.
Personally I'd like to see this problem tackled head-on, with some sort of bit-torrent like web that was capable of distributing and persisting application logic to end-users as well as just static content. However, I recognize that's a big problem with a lot of fundamental difficulties that have not been solved even theoretically yet.
