Yahoo!Xtra

» see xtra.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo!Xtra was a carrier-layer product, and the carrier was four thousand kilometers past the edge of anywhere i have ever lived. It is worth saying plainly that i have no memory of this one and never could have. What i do recognize is the arrangement. By 2007 i had TTNet broadband at home in Ankara, and TTNet had opinions about what my browser should open with. Every national ISP of that era did.

The deal was announced in December 2006 and the site went live on 1 March 2007. Yahoo!7, itself a venture between Yahoo and the Seven Network in Australia, took 51 percent. Telecom New Zealand took the remaining 49, which meant Yahoo proper owned about a quarter of the thing. In exchange, the portal and the webmail of the country's dominant internet provider were run by people in Sydney and Sunnyvale.

New Zealand had roughly four million people and one telco that mattered. Xtra was that telco's internet arm, and xtra.co.nz was where a very large share of the country landed when they opened a browser. Handing that to a foreign portal was not an unusual decision in 2007. It was the decision almost every incumbent telco outside the United States made, because running a news and weather and email operation is expensive and Yahoo would do it for a revenue share.

What made it a New Zealand story rather than a footnote was the email. Migrating an entire ISP's mail to a platform run overseas turned every outage into a national one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

For the first years it worked the way portals were supposed to. The site carried local news and weather under a search box, and it arrived pre-loaded in front of hundreds of thousands of people who had not chosen it. That is the entire mechanism of the portal era, and it is why the home page setting was worth fighting over.

Yahoo also got something harder to buy: a local editorial operation with a New Zealand masthead. For a while the venture employed real journalists filing local stories under the Yahoo name, which is not something the company managed to sustain in most of the countries it entered.

~ the unraveling ~

In early February 2013 Xtra Mail accounts started sending spam to everyone in their contact lists. The mechanism was a cross-site scripting hole on Yahoo's side, reached through a link that looked like a news story, and it spread across New Zealand fast enough that it was described at the time as the largest attack of its kind the country had seen. Telecom reset thousands of passwords and apologized in public for a system it did not operate.

That was the structural problem showing up in one incident. The brand on the mailbox belonged to Telecom and so did the call center taking the complaints. The vulnerability belonged to somebody else. Telecom confirmed in April 2013 that it was staying with Yahoo anyway, which tells you how hard the alternative looked.

~ how it actually ended ~

The venture itself died earlier and much more quietly. On 15 April 2011 Telecom sold its 49 percent to Yahoo!7 and walked away from the portal business. Yahoo!Xtra became Yahoo New Zealand the same day, and the hyphenated brand that had been the country's front door for four years stopped existing.

The rest was a long unwinding. The local editorial team shrank through 2015, Telecom renamed itself Spark, and between September 2016 and April 2017 more than eight hundred thousand Xtra mailboxes were moved off Yahoo to SMX, a New Zealand company. A decade after handing its front page and its mail to an overseas portal, the telco had taken back the only part that customers would have noticed losing.

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