Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.
These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.
I know this seems like a simple childish comparison but it’s more that for a digital/virtual world we had the choice to build spaces and systems that afforded us real progression. We didn’t. The greedy got their hands on it.
Example - If I was building a church in the virtual world what key elements does it need? Who owns it? What can it give? How does it fund itself?
I know it’s more complex than this.