They're blocking Internet Archive?
TechLinked
·TechLinked
·2026-04-18
·
186 words · ~0 min read
0:00
23 major news outlets are blocking the Internet Archive's incredibly useful Wayback Machine
0:05
from crawling their sites. We cannot, in fact, have nice things anymore. USA Today just recently
0:11
used the Wayback Machine to call out ICE for altering detention stats, and then immediately
0:16
blocked the archival tool from crawling their own site. Just rude. The news outlets say this
0:20
is necessary to stop AI crawlers from treating their sites like an all-you-can-scrape buffet.
0:26
The Guardian's director of business affairs said that the Wayback Machine's API is a real AI risk,
0:31
so they are only going to be blocking that. Maybe don't attack them on social media.
0:34
Wayback's director Mark Graham responded, calling those AI fears unfounded and restating how much
0:40
effort they put into preventing possible abuses of the crawler. Groups like Fight for the Future
0:45
and Electronic Frontier Foundation are rallying journalists to publicly back the Archive,
0:50
and over 100 of them have signed a letter thanking the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine for
0:55
being a part of it.
0:56
Being an essential and critical tool.