GeoCities let millions of people build a web page for free in the late 1990s, no domain, no hosting bill, just a login. It felt like ownership at the time, your own little corner of the internet with a URL and a page counter. In 2009 Yahoo shut the whole thing down and most of those pages disappeared within a short window.
Nobody who built on GeoCities owned anything, they were borrowing space on someone else’s server, on someone else’s terms. That is the lesson Larry points back to whenever he talks about Web12, free hosting was never ownership, it was a loan. The same trade shows up today on social platforms, free reach in exchange for content you do not actually control.
A platform can change its algorithm, change its rules, or shut its doors, and the page you built there goes with it. Web12 answers this directly, publish the page on a domain you pay for and control, then use the free platforms only to point traffic at it.
Owning the domain costs a little money every year, which is exactly why it survives, someone has to keep paying to keep it up, and that someone is you. The GeoCities pages that still exist today mostly survive because someone bothered to archive them off the platform entirely.
Larry’s take is blunt: if you did not pay for the address, you do not own the address. Publish home first, syndicate everywhere else, and no shutdown notice ever takes your page down with it.
Details: Watch Larry on GeoCities
#GeoCities #OwnYourDomain #Web12