May 12, 2026 · 52 min · 12 segments
Recently, Mike joined Dave Hansen, Mark Graham and Kendra Albert on a panel for the Future Knowledge podcast, a joint production of the Internet Archive and the Authors Alliance. The discussion covers…
Kendra AlbertPanelistMark GrahamPanelist
Mike MasnickPanelist
Chris FreelandHostMike MasnickHostWell, I mean, first of all, for close to 30 years, Internet Archive's way back machine has been archiving much of the public web, including journalism, and making that material available to people.
I should note that a large percentage of this material was no longer available on the live web.
And indeed, thousands and thousands of news sites that we have archived over the decades are no longer available online.
And what has been going on recently, as reported by Andrew Deck of Harvard's journalism school and others, is that some news organizations and other platforms, most notably the New York Times and Reddit, have been blocking news.
the ability preventing the Internet Archives Wayback Machine from producing archives of their material and making that available.
Indeed, it has been suggested that we are victims, if you will, collateral damage caught up in the conflict between AI companies and publishers.
Mike, how about let's hear from you and take this whatever direction you want, but I'm particularly interested in your take on sort of the broader, like, what's happening in the policy sphere around this.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really tricky space because I think that a lot of people certainly recognize the value and importance of preserving culture and understanding culture, building things like institutions like libraries and related institutions.
And yet there's been this kind of struggle in large part because of the rise of AI, which Mark sort of hinted at in his opening, which is that, you know, until just a few years ago, most people considered the archiving of the web and of other resources as something that was seen sort of akin to the role of the library, which makes sense.
But with the rise of AI tools, there is this interesting challenge in that, you know, all of the major frontier LLM models have been trained on huge corpuses of data and they're always looking for more.
And there are all sorts of Other related discussions on, you know, is training fair use and things like that, which I don't think we need to get into here.
And so companies, especially the media companies, are certainly very concerned about the way that the AI companies have gotten access to their data for training purposes, and they feel that they are uncompensated and that they need to be compensated.
You mentioned the New York Times and Reddit and New York Times is suing OpenAI and has cut deals with others and Reddit has cut deals with Google and some others.
And there's all sorts of back and forth and negotiations and all of, This debate then becomes collateral damage to that because the fear is, and I think it's an overblown and misguided fear, that because you have organizations like the Internet Archive building the Wayback Machine, which, again, they've built for decades and I think most people recognize is just a generally useful tool for the preservation of culture and for education.
researchers and for the journalists at some of the news organizations who are complaining, they feel that something like the Wayback Machine offers a way to go around these negotiations and undercut the negotiations in some form or another, which I think is...
At some point, in retrospect, we'll be seen as a huge mistake by those media organizations, an overreaction to a problem that probably isn't really a problem.
But in this sort of rush to deal with this concern of, oh my gosh, the AI companies are taking over everything, they're looking to plug any hole and block any opportunity for the AI companies to train on their material and the collateral damage of that is that some of them are now blocking the Wayback Machine.
And I think, you know, there are other efforts then to see about, will there be either on the legal side, which Kendra can talk about, or just through technical measures, will there be ways to put up effectively toll booths on the internet if you want to archive this or if you want to make use of the larger corpus of data that various news organizations have put together? Do you first have to pay a toll? Do the AI scanning companies have to effectively pay for the right to read that content? And that leads to a whole bunch of other downstream issues, but I'll cut it off there and give Kendra a chance to talk as well.
Well, I mean, first of all, for close to 30 years, Internet Archive's way back machine has been archiving much of the public web, including journalism, and making that material available to people.
I should note that a large percentage of this material was no longer available on the live web.
And indeed, thousands and thousands of news sites that we have archived over the decades are no longer available online.
And what has been going on recently, as reported by Andrew Deck of Harvard's journalism school and others, is that some news organizations and other platforms, most notably the New York Times and Reddit, have been blocking news.
the ability preventing the Internet Archives Wayback Machine from producing archives of their material and making that available.
Indeed, it has been suggested that we are victims, if you will, collateral damage caught up in the conflict between AI companies and publishers.
Mike, how about let's hear from you and take this whatever direction you want, but I'm particularly interested in your take on sort of the broader, like, what's happening in the policy sphere around this.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really tricky space because I think that a lot of people certainly recognize the value and importance of preserving culture and understanding culture, building things like institutions like libraries and related institutions.
And yet there's been this kind of struggle in large part because of the rise of AI, which Mark sort of hinted at in his opening, which is that, you know, until just a few years ago, most people considered the archiving of the web and of other resources as something that was seen sort of akin to the role of the library, which makes sense.
But with the rise of AI tools, there is this interesting challenge in that, you know, all of the major frontier LLM models have been trained on huge corpuses of data and they're always looking for more.
And there are all sorts of Other related discussions on, you know, is training fair use and things like that, which I don't think we need to get into here.
And so companies, especially the media companies, are certainly very concerned about the way that the AI companies have gotten access to their data for training purposes, and they feel that they are uncompensated and that they need to be compensated.
You mentioned the New York Times and Reddit and New York Times is suing OpenAI and has cut deals with others and Reddit has cut deals with Google and some others.
And there's all sorts of back and forth and negotiations and all of, This debate then becomes collateral damage to that because the fear is, and I think it's an overblown and misguided fear, that because you have organizations like the Internet Archive building the Wayback Machine, which, again, they've built for decades and I think most people recognize is just a generally useful tool for the preservation of culture and for education.
researchers and for the journalists at some of the news organizations who are complaining, they feel that something like the Wayback Machine offers a way to go around these negotiations and undercut the negotiations in some form or another, which I think is...
At some point, in retrospect, we'll be seen as a huge mistake by those media organizations, an overreaction to a problem that probably isn't really a problem.
But in this sort of rush to deal with this concern of, oh my gosh, the AI companies are taking over everything, they're looking to plug any hole and block any opportunity for the AI companies to train on their material and the collateral damage of that is that some of them are now blocking the Wayback Machine.
And I think, you know, there are other efforts then to see about, will there be either on the legal side, which Kendra can talk about, or just through technical measures, will there be ways to put up effectively toll booths on the internet if you want to archive this or if you want to make use of the larger corpus of data that various news organizations have put together? Do you first have to pay a toll? Do the AI scanning companies have to effectively pay for the right to read that content? And that leads to a whole bunch of other downstream issues, but I'll cut it off there and give Kendra a chance to talk as well.
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