Ze380y
Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:53:55 +0000

241 News Sites Blocked the Internet Archive — And Nobody Can Find 2025 Anymore

The New York Times, The Guardian, and 239 other publishers are torching 30 years of web history to fight an AI war the Internet Archive didn’t start.

241 news sites across 9 countries now block the Wayback Machine. 93% block at least two of its four crawlers. Wikipedia links to 2.6 million archived news articles that may vanish. The Internet Archive has preserved over 1 trillion web pages since the mid-1990s. And publishers are burning it all down because they’re mad at OpenAI.

Look, the EFF just put out a piece that’s basically a fire alarm for the entire internet’s memory. And nobody’s paying attention because everyone’s too busy arguing about whether AI training is fair use. Meanwhile, the actual library is getting locked out.

🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary (click for more details) 📰 The Backstory — How We Got Here (click for more details) 📊 The Numbers That Matter (click for more details) 🗣️ What the EFF Is Actually Saying (click for more details) 😤 What the Publishers Say Back (click for more details) 🔍 The Collateral Damage Nobody Talks About (click for more details)

Cool. So the Newspaper Industry Is Burning Down the Library. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)

💾 Flip 1: Build a Personal Web Archive Service (click for more details) 📰 Flip 2: Sell 'Before It Disappears' Newsletter Bundles (click for more details) 🛡️ Flip 3: Offer robots.txt Auditing for Small Publishers (click for more details) 📖 Flip 4: Create a 'Web Preservation' Course for Librarians and Archivists (click for more details) ⚡ Flip 5: Build a Browser Extension That Auto-Saves Pages to Decentralized Storage (click for more details) 🛠️ Follow-Up Actions (click for more details)

Quick Hits

Want to… | Do this
Check if a site is still archived | Go to web.archive.org and paste the URL
Save a page yourself right now | Use archive.today — one click, permanent snapshot
Self-host your own archive | Set up ArchiveBox (open source, runs on a Raspberry Pi)
Block AI scrapers but keep archivists | Add GPTBot and CCBot to robots.txt, leave archive.org_bot alone
Track which publishers are blocking | Follow the Nieman Lab and Techdirt coverage

They’re not fighting AI. They’re fighting memory. And memory always loses when nobody’s watching.

Read full topic