A 2011 wager on link rot: will one URL still resolve in 2022?

In 2011, two web veterans put a decade-long bet on the table at Long Bets over whether a single URL would survive. Keith argued that link rot is the web’s entropy — that any given document’s odds of staying at its original address erode sharply over time, and that even eleven years is too long to expect one to persist. Matt Haughey took the other side, contending that after two decades and several boom-bust cycles, the tooling and practices for keeping a stable URI are now within reach of anyone with moderate technical skill; he pointed to his own 13-year-old sites still resolving through 301 redirects to a canonical scheme.

The terms were precise: on February 22, 2022, typing or following http://www.longbets.org/601 had to return an HTML document containing the prediction’s exact text, with a 301 redirect to a page carrying that text counting as a pass. The stakes were charitable rather than personal — winnings go to Bletchley Park Trust if Keith prevails, or the Internet Archive if Haughey does.

The bet is a compact case study in web durability, framed against Tim Berners-Lee’s 1999 line that “cool URIs don’t change.” It captures a real tension for anyone who publishes online: permanence is technically achievable through disciplined redirect and URI management, but it demands sustained maintenance that most sites never get. The redirect-satisfies-the-terms clause is telling — it concedes that surviving a decade is less about the original address holding and more about someone bothering to keep the path alive.