Internet Archive is a digital library that was founded in 1996 with the aim of preserving the. Its best-known tool is Wayback Machinewhich is a digital file that Allows you to view old versions of millions of websites.
Wayback Machine works as a kind of allowing See how the Internet has transformed over the last 30 years and, furthermore, access content that has been removed.
In that sense, from the German media They highlight that having a tool like Wayback Machine is important “especially at a time when the Trump administration is erasing climate data from websites of the authorities and removes black and queer people from the commemorative and historical pages.”
However, the task of storing the legacy of the Internet is becoming more complicated for the Internet Archive in some specific cases. Prestigious media outlets such as The New York Times o The Guardian have decided to prevent the Wayback Machine from archiving their pages.
From Taz They point out that these media “not only for ethical reasons – the commitment to the truth – they should be interested in the project, but also for the investigations. In the archive we can access deleted publications of politicians and policies.”
They refuse for fear that the content will be used for free by AI models
However, The New York Times y The Guardian They have an important argument to deny Internet Archive authorization to monitor their pages: They fear that the information collected could be used to train different artificial intelligence models without the technology companies paying the respective license for it.
Despite that understandable reason for refusing to appear in the Wayback Machine archives, More than 100 journalists have published a letter in which they value the activity of the Internet Archive and they underline the importance of making this type of information available to information professionals.
“Preserving this archive is of vital importance for the protection of journalistic heritage”the journalists have highlighted in the letter.
