Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Mar 16, 2026 · 590 words · By Joe Mullin

Topics

Appeal to Fear (confidence: 95%)

Building support by instilling anxiety or panic in the audience.

Loaded Language (confidence: 90%)

Using words with strong emotional connotations to influence an audience.

“The Internet Archive has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to confirm or refute the claim about Internet Archive's newspaper preservation timeline.

“The Internet Archive operates the Wayback Machine, which contains more than one trillion archived web pages.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to verify the trillion-page claim about Wayback Machine capacity.

“The New York Times began blocking the Internet Archive from crawling its website using technical measures beyond robots.txt rules.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to confirm or deny NYT's technical blocking measures against Internet Archive.

“The New York Times attributes its blocking of the Internet Archive to concerns about AI companies scraping news content.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to verify NYT's stated motivation for blocking Internet Archive.

“Publishers, including The New York Times, are suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to confirm publishers' legal actions against AI companies over copyrighted material.

“The Internet Archive has preserved the web’s historical record for nearly thirty years.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to verify the 30-year claim about Internet Archive's web preservation.

“Wikipedia links to more than 2.6 million news articles preserved at the Internet Archive.”

❓ INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE — No evidence in archive to confirm Wikipedia's linking to 2.6 million archived articles.