zSHARE

» see zshare.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By the time broadband was normal in Turkish homes, around 2006, a file on a forum was a link to somebody else's server. RapidShare was the name that mattered on the boards I read. zSHARE was one of the others, the host in the second post, the mirror somebody put up after the first link went dead. It never had a personality the way RapidShare or Megaupload did. It had a green download arrow and it worked.

The earliest capture of zshare.net is from 12 August 2005 and the site is already finished by then, calling itself a free host for files with image and video hosting alongside. You uploaded without an account. You agreed to a terms box and got a link. The company behind it was based in Hong Kong and never put a human name on the front page, which was standard for the business: the whole cyberlocker model depended on being a neutral pipe that had no idea what was in the pipe.

What zSHARE actually became known for was music. TorrentFreak, which was the only outlet that noticed it going, described it as a site popular with music uploaders, and that is what it was: the delivery layer for the mp3 blog era, the thing behind the link in a post about an album that had leaked. Album blogs were not hosting anything themselves. They were writing paragraphs around somebody else's file locker.

~ the case file ~

~ the megaupload wave ~

On 19 January 2012 US authorities seized Megaupload, arrested Kim Dotcom in New Zealand and took roughly the largest file host in the world off the internet in an afternoon. Everyone assumed the traffic had to land somewhere. zSHARE's numbers spiked immediately as the refugees arrived.

The spike lasted about a fortnight. By early February the traffic had drifted back to its pre-January level, which is the detail that makes the rest of it legible: the surge was not new demand, it was the same people looking for somewhere to put the same files, and most of them had already worked out that the safest place was nowhere. Across that spring the whole sector flinched. FileSonic switched off sharing between users within days of the raid, and other hosts followed by blocking American visitors or killing the affiliate payouts that had made uploading worth doing.

~ the silence ~

At the end of April 2012 zshare.net stopped answering. There was no farewell page, no statement, no indictment, no press conference on a courthouse step. Google removed it from the index, so within days the site was not merely gone but unfindable, and the millions of forum posts pointing at it turned into dead ends all at once. TorrentFreak filed 127 words about it on 25 April and that is very close to the entire written record of a service that ran for seven years.

Nobody ever confirmed why. The reasonable guess is the obvious one: watching the Megaupload indictment land, an anonymous operator in Hong Kong decided that a business built on other people's copyrighted files was no longer worth the personal exposure, and turned it off rather than wait to find out.

~ what the domain does now ~

zshare.net resolves today. It serves a WordPress site publishing filler about job hunting and online casinos, in several languages, under the old brand name. The domain was worth real money as an aged property with millions of inbound links pointing at it, and somebody bought it for exactly that. The green arrow is gone. The backlinks are the asset.

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