The Internet Archive at 30: Can the web’s memory bank withstand the AI era?

Three decades after Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive to preserve humanity’s digital record, the nonprofit behind the Wayback Machine is confronting AI scraping fears, antagonistic publishers, and rising storage costs that threaten the future of the open web.

Brewster Kahle at the physical archive In Richmond, CA in 2020. [Photo: Internet Archive]

If you were to travel back in time to 1996 with a 2TB thumb drive, you’d be able to fit the entire World Wide Web on it.

Of course, that kind of storage didn’t exist in the........

© Fast Company