Some news organizations are restricting access to the #WaybackMachine over fears of AI scraping. Mark Graham @mark, director of the Wayback Machine, explains why these concerns are unfounded and that blocking archives risks harming the public record.
Get the story on Techdirt đź”—
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/preserving-the-web-is-not-the-problem-losing-it-is/
Honest feedback from someone that’s never worked there but been around enough to be the ear for people that don’t feel heard?
The archive needs an actual way to distance themselves from
- crypto
- ai
The public is losing faith in those “institutions” and they are irrelevant to the archive’s mission for “universal access to all knowledge” and actually are starting to risk that mission.
Speaking for myself, the AI Ben Franklin bit left me feeling like the humanity of the audience failed to connect with the humanity of the archive, for what gain?
Spent some time brainstorming— my recommendation is a concept for a documentary
“The Good Neighborhood Data Center”
We start with a title that gets at the heart
- what is data and where does it live
And we miss all the drama of explaining the dystopia, because people get it now, they really do, what they don’t have are
- hope
- alternatives
That’s what the documentary will deliver
We travel back in time and highlight how information has been passed on generation by generation
Then we go deep on the archive itself, really highlighting how the archive is a Lab for Libraries and showing how everything on earth fits in one church.
From there we trace out the archive’s partner libraries, leaving the archive behind but following the legacy and influence the same way we established passing information from generation to generation.
Just an honest, “the library is a global network of people that care and that’s all it ever was and ever will be”
Gotta go back to work, you’ve got this, pulling for you guys!
Ryan W. Featherston
internetarchive
definitely just a musician