As boycotters, we had asked for a number of issues to be addressed, including a definite ceasation of the rights they are granted when you leave the service, the ability to leave before agreeing to any new ToS change made regarding your content and how it is used, and the clear limitation of the use of your content solely for its display on the service on which you stored this content.

The new GeoCities ToS addresses each of these concerns in a clear, positive and concise manner which may well serve as a blueprint for similar Terms of Service agreements throughout the young internet community.

I would first like to give kudos to Yahoo and GeoCities for making these changes and being responsive to both your membership and other concerned citizens on the internet.

I would like to thank Mark Welch for the incredible job he did with not one but two TV interviews plus analysis as we went along. Similarly, Tracy Marks for her interview with Fox and Mattison for all of the hard contact work he's done in the arts community. Also, Arthur at vividimagination.com for being the recipient of a landslide of emails from people contributing graphics to the effort, not to mention hosting them on his site.

A whole heap of  praise goes out to the guys running the Haunting of GeoCities site. They put in a ton of work coordinating the large number of "greyed-out" GeoCities sites (rest those fingers guys!).

I would like to thank all of the thousands and thousands of visitors and contributors we've had, both for and against the boycott. You have spoken, Yahoo listened, and you got your message across peacefully, without the involvement of lawsuits, legislation, etc.

On the computing side I give a big "Yahoo!" (sorry Yahooians :P) to the folks at http://come.to and their related sites. As the line says above, if you don't care where you're hosting you might want to try a virtual address. Also helping with computers and bandwidth are the folks at Xpression Web Solutions without whom this boycott site and my own SitePowerUP.com site wouldn't be able to function.

As they say repeatedly on the academy awards show, I'm sure I've left people off this list; I hope you don't take offense. I've been working with little sleep for the past eight days trying to keep up with the day-to-day needs of the web site, background interviews and the rest of the stuff which doesn't make the headlines.

As for me, I plan to fade back into obscurity for a time, get some sleep and relax. I would like to lead the charge to create a Homesteader's Bill of Rights but upon further reflection I may not be the right person for that job. I do, however, wish to work within such an organization to promote positive change in the free hosting industry and, eventually, the rest of the internet as well.

We did it folks!

Cheers,

Jim Townsend  aka 

9 PM PST, July 6, 1999