EFF Tells Publishers: Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, But It Will Erase The Historical Record
Sat Mar 21 2026
Censorship
Internet
Media
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"Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin.
"That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months."
The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit...
The T...