23 major news outlets are blocking the Internet Archive's incredibly useful Wayback Machine
from crawling their sites. We cannot, in fact, have nice things anymore. USA Today just recently
used the Wayback Machine to call out ICE for altering detention stats, and then immediately
blocked the archival tool from crawling their own site. Just rude. The news outlets say this
is necessary to stop AI crawlers from treating their sites like an all-you-can-scrape buffet.
The Guardian's director of business affairs said that the Wayback Machine's API is a real AI risk,
so they are only going to be blocking that. Maybe don't attack them on social media.
Wayback's director Mark Graham responded, calling those AI fears unfounded and restating how much
effort they put into preventing possible abuses of the crawler. Groups like Fight for the Future
and Electronic Frontier Foundation are rallying journalists to publicly back the Archive,
and over 100 of them have signed a letter thanking the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine for
being a part of it.
Being an essential and critical tool.