Topic analysis

Digital memory at stake: Why news outlets block the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine, a 30-year-old web archiving project by San Francisco-based non-profit Archive.org that preserves over 1 billion web pages and is vital for journalists, researchers, historians, and lawyers, is facing an existential threat as at least 241 major news outlets across nine countries—including The Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, and USA Today—block its crawlers. These media outlets fear AI companies are using their archived content without permission or compensation to train language models, despite their own reliance on the archive for tasks like retrieving deleted content, leading to calls for technical separations between archiving and AI training, legal safeguards for web archives, and framing archiving as public infrastructure.