Sadly, it does not even have to be an acquisition or rebrand. For most companies, a simple "website redo", even if the brand remains unchanged, will change up all the URL's such that any prior recorded ones return "not found". Granted, if the identical attestation is simply at a new url, someone could potentially find that new url and update the "policy" -- but that's also an extra effort that the insurance company can avoid by requiring screen shots or PDF exports.
Yes we have hundreds of identical Microsoft and Aws policies, but it's the only way. Checksum the full zip and sign it as part of the contract, that's literally how we do it
That's actually a potentially good business idea - a legally certifiable archiving software that captures the content at a URL and signs it digitally at the moment of capture. Such a service may become a business requirement as Internet archivability continues to decline.
I don't know how exactly it achieves being "legally certifiable", at least to the point that courts are trusting it. Signing and timestamping with independent transparency logs would be reasonable.
Any vendor who you work with should make it trivial to access these docs, even little baby startups usually make it quite accessible - although often under NDA or contract, but once that's over with you just download a zip and everything is there.
That's what I thought the first time I was involved in a SOC2 audit. But a lot of the "evidence" I sent was just screenshots. Granted, the stuff I did wasn't legal documents, it was things like the output of commands, pages from cloud consoles, etc.
What I would not do is take a screenshot of a vendor website and say "look, they have a SOC2". At every company, even tiny little startup land, vendors go through a vendor assessment that involves collecting the documents from them. Most vendors don't even publicly share docs like that on a site so there'd be nothing to screenshot / link to.
That is: if it's not accessible by a human who was blocked?
Having your cake and eating it too should never be valid law.
Or are you thinking of companies like Iron Mountain that provide such a service for paper? But even within corporations, not everything goes to a service like Iron Mountain, only paper that is legally required to be preserved.
A society that doesn't preserve its history is a society that loses its culture over time.
[1] https://www.mololamken.com/assets/htmldocuments/NLJ_5th%20Ci...
[2] https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-au/knowledge/publicat...