Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved; CNN, November 16, 2025

 Hadas Gold , CNN; Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved

"The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.

For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.

Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.

It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all."

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost; Ars Technica, November 3, 2025

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

"This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas."

The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts; The Guardian, October 9, 2023

 Brewster Kahle, The Guardian; The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts

"he US library system, once the model for the world, is under assault from politicians, rightwing activists and corporate publishers. Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts, a fate only narrowly avoided by New York City’s public libraries this summer. In a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books.

This war on libraries – and on the traditional values of equal opportunity, universal education and cultural preservation they represent – directly contravenes the will of the majority in the United States. Polls reveal that public support for libraries is as strong as ever. But the profession of librarianship has become a hazardous one, because of the actions of a hostile minority. It’s time to reverse course."