Am I correct that this has come about because archive.org respects robots.txt and these sites have blocked their crawler from indexing their sites?
I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts on this exactly, other than to say it's disappointing that doing the right thing (i.e. respecting robots.txt) is rewarded with the burden of soliciting responses to a petition while at the same time others are rewarded with profit for ignoring those same directives.
Don't know if it helps your musings at all, but there's a good chance that if a high-profile crawler like archive.org disrespected their robots.txt, that archive.org would be faced with lawsuits (or some other form of pressure). This is not merely the most moral move; rather it is the only sensible move.
The only reason "others are rewarded with profit" in cases like these are because pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating.
>pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the spectrum there. It's some of the biggest players who flaunt the rules.
Fair point. Being small and shadowy is a sufficient condition to avoid litigation, but not a necessary one. Another sufficient condition is having billions of dollars to throw around. Unfortunately, archive.org is well known, well loved, and fundamentally harmless.
Side note: You probably mean "flout" instead of "flaunt."
Correct. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt:
User-agent: archive.org_bot
Disallow: /
Which they don’t respect. I’ve had it for my blog for years and they still added it to wayback machine, see my last comment for their official announcement of the ignore robots.txt policy, it is not new.
robots.txt means they shouldn't auto-scan your site. Any user though can go to the wayback machine and type in a URL and the wayback machine will read that URL. That was the intent of robots.txt (don't scan) not (don't read period). It's spelled out in the spec for robots.txt
It's because they want to restrict AI companies from stealing content, but they can't do it if internet archive proxies it all for them.
All of the LLMs would be massively less useful if it wasn't for scraping the latest news.
LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.
> LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
What's the conclusion from this train if thought? Just because some burglars can pick locks doesn't mean you should leave your front door unlocked.
Locking a door (or robots.txt) is how one can establish mens rea for those who bypass the barrier.
The legal implications would be different vs scraping publicly available content.
"stealing" is BS because the original still exists. Copyright infringement is more correct.
they're stealing page views
[dead]
It's the same idiocy that DRM created.
Be a pirate, because a pirate is free...
[deleted]
Idea: allow scraping but can’t publish for 1 year?
Maybe they should have an escrow like Financial Times is available on NewsBank service with a 30 day escrow
Need a cryptographically verifiable internet archive. This is probably not possible without something like web 3 or nostr or gpg pgp. Idk.
Can't the archive publish the SSL signatures of all the requests or something?
You can cryptographically verify a timestamp though by piggybacking on bitcoin like opentimestamps do.
There is still archive.today, too bad the owner is crazy
Ok, but what about Meta and X etc.
[deleted]
A bunch of people who have haven't ever loaded an ad or paid a subscription to those organizations are going to make a stand to demand they leave their backdoor open?
I know a little about this debate on the Times and Atlantic sides. I’ll get some grief for this, but I asked a senior person at the former what they thought about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
In the end, we settled on agreeing that making such stuff available after 30 days, and possibly with access restrictions (can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future) struck the right balance.
To my knowledge, the Internet Archive hasn’t done any outreach on this issue. In addition to pressuring the publications, I’d put some pressure on them to negotiate.
Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.
It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.
The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.
In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.
I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.
I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.
>about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
Is the Internet Archive regularly used as a paywall workaround? Generally it's archive.is, which has no connection to the IA.
That's not the point.
Yes, he got that wrong. The IA doesn't remove paywalls.
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> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future
In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.
I signed, but let’s be honest.
A pie chart showing the times I used the wayback machine to read an old NYT article vs the times I visited it due to a highly upvoted top HN comment linking to a relatively new article so we all can bypass the paywall is a solid circle.
Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.
I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?
The petition should be to ban the AI theft. If it is on wayback, the bots could as well scrape the NYT directly.
The NYT is of course guilty itself. It did not investigate the possible murder of its star witness Suchir Balaji and is too reserved in examining the consequences of AI in general.
If they don't fulfill their journalistic and societal obligations, soon its own journalists will be replaced by AI bullet point slop like Axios.
Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
I'm grown up now, I understand how things work, and I'd rather see Tide and Coke ads than pay $20/mo to 8 different orgs, while maintaining that ad free option for those who want it.
The children of the internet probably won't sign a truce, so let's just cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.
I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.
How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?
Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).
> How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
That era vastly predates the Internet, let alone the (relatively) ad-free pre-1980s Internet, neither of which we can return to in any meaningful fashion.
>cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
Ah, so, take the money out of it completely? No subscriptions, and no ads? Sounds like a good idea to me.
I'm fine with ads as long as they are integrated with the page. What I hate is the typical Google Adsense garbage where the same ad is plastered in 4 different places on the page, with a video ad playing in the corner, and if you're lucky, a popup ad as well.
> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
Nope, two problems
1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.
2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.
We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.
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After many years of these media outlets circling the drain, this is likely the clearest signal of their irrelevance. It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
And by what standards have you determined that these outlets are circling the drain?
The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.
More important than ever before and less market value than ever before. :(
[deleted]
It’s kind of shocking to read what you wrote, and realize those big media brands used to be independent journalism.
Are we considering the NYT and USA Today "independent journalism" still? Seems dubious...
I don't know about USA Today. NYT at least seems independent if left leaning. I've not seen them be unfairly biased or bend over backwards to cater to outside corporate interests just yet. They're certainly not bending the knee to the current administration.
They have a robust paying subscriber base that supports them and don't have an owner whose last name rhymes with Pesos who can axe a story just because he doesn't like what it says.
That a Democrat-leaning paper would criticize Republican politicians is not surprising. A better test of independence would be whether they criticize Democratic politicians (when they do things deserving criticism, that is: I don't expect them to criticize policy positions that they agree with, but all politicians do some things, in some cases many things, deserving of criticism).
> the clearest signal of their irrelevance
NYT had $2.82B in revenue in 2025.
> It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
I recommend you actually go and read those fiches. The press was not historically high quality. Mass media has had the same problems for decades.
What it used to have was genuine independent competition.
Wouldn’t it be better to let these legacy news orgs (which aren’t really anything beyond advertising and data harvesting firms) block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under? I’m struggling to think of a reason I need NY Times. I’ve never had a subscription and never seen writing that I thought benefited me as a citizen (they’re Very pro-war of any kind).
> block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under?
…why would they go under if the people who don’t pay for news stop reading them?
Media influence and authority has historically depended on getting cited by writing that is more directly relevant to the reader's concern (i.e. the topic of research).
The paywalls were one thing, but disallowing archival is practically suicide.
[deleted]
if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.
The title freaked me out. I thought this was about the Wayback Machine going away but no, it's just news publications blocking being archived.
I guess I don't really care. As soon as it becomes unworkable to view these publications through archivers I'll just stop viewing them altogether. I don't see this helping their bottom line though.
As long as other people are reading them, they're important for understanding what's happening in the world and what information the public is getting, which is why we need an accessible archive of their content.
Exactly. Libraries have kept microfiche archives of newspapers for forever, and they're an essential part of historical research.
They also preserved old books. But now I guess they're becoming middlemen for access to limited ebook platforms that ensure books disappear when publishers lose interest.
The "Information Age" is proving to be the setup for a dark age, when nonprofitable things are just thrown out and efforts to preserve them are actively fought.
I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.
Am I correct that this has come about because archive.org respects robots.txt and these sites have blocked their crawler from indexing their sites?
I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts on this exactly, other than to say it's disappointing that doing the right thing (i.e. respecting robots.txt) is rewarded with the burden of soliciting responses to a petition while at the same time others are rewarded with profit for ignoring those same directives.
Don't know if it helps your musings at all, but there's a good chance that if a high-profile crawler like archive.org disrespected their robots.txt, that archive.org would be faced with lawsuits (or some other form of pressure). This is not merely the most moral move; rather it is the only sensible move.
The only reason "others are rewarded with profit" in cases like these are because pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating.
>pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the spectrum there. It's some of the biggest players who flaunt the rules.
"Several AI companies said to be ignoring robots dot txt exclusion, scraping content without permission: report" (2024) https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Fair point. Being small and shadowy is a sufficient condition to avoid litigation, but not a necessary one. Another sufficient condition is having billions of dollars to throw around. Unfortunately, archive.org is well known, well loved, and fundamentally harmless.
Side note: You probably mean "flout" instead of "flaunt."
Correct. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt:
Which they don’t respect. I’ve had it for my blog for years and they still added it to wayback machine, see my last comment for their official announcement of the ignore robots.txt policy, it is not new.
robots.txt means they shouldn't auto-scan your site. Any user though can go to the wayback machine and type in a URL and the wayback machine will read that URL. That was the intent of robots.txt (don't scan) not (don't read period). It's spelled out in the spec for robots.txt
The <meta name="robots"> tag and robots.txt serve different roles: robots.txt controls crawling, while the robots meta tag influences indexing and other behavior. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I wonder how archive.org_bot behaves when <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, nocache" /> is present.
No, archive.org does NOT respect robots.txt. You need to reach out to them directly and ask your site not be included: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
It's because they want to restrict AI companies from stealing content, but they can't do it if internet archive proxies it all for them.
All of the LLMs would be massively less useful if it wasn't for scraping the latest news.
LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.
> LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
What's the conclusion from this train if thought? Just because some burglars can pick locks doesn't mean you should leave your front door unlocked.
Locking a door (or robots.txt) is how one can establish mens rea for those who bypass the barrier.
The legal implications would be different vs scraping publicly available content.
"stealing" is BS because the original still exists. Copyright infringement is more correct.
they're stealing page views
[dead]
It's the same idiocy that DRM created.
Be a pirate, because a pirate is free...
Idea: allow scraping but can’t publish for 1 year?
Maybe they should have an escrow like Financial Times is available on NewsBank service with a 30 day escrow
Need a cryptographically verifiable internet archive. This is probably not possible without something like web 3 or nostr or gpg pgp. Idk.
Can't the archive publish the SSL signatures of all the requests or something?
You can cryptographically verify a timestamp though by piggybacking on bitcoin like opentimestamps do.
Many unrelated archives would be good enough
> Idk.
Yeah.
I am looking forward to this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516)
There is still archive.today, too bad the owner is crazy
Ok, but what about Meta and X etc.
A bunch of people who have haven't ever loaded an ad or paid a subscription to those organizations are going to make a stand to demand they leave their backdoor open?
I know a little about this debate on the Times and Atlantic sides. I’ll get some grief for this, but I asked a senior person at the former what they thought about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
In the end, we settled on agreeing that making such stuff available after 30 days, and possibly with access restrictions (can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future) struck the right balance.
To my knowledge, the Internet Archive hasn’t done any outreach on this issue. In addition to pressuring the publications, I’d put some pressure on them to negotiate.
Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.
It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.
The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.
In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.
I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.
I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.
>about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
Is the Internet Archive regularly used as a paywall workaround? Generally it's archive.is, which has no connection to the IA.
That's not the point.
Yes, he got that wrong. The IA doesn't remove paywalls.
> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future
In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.
I signed, but let’s be honest.
A pie chart showing the times I used the wayback machine to read an old NYT article vs the times I visited it due to a highly upvoted top HN comment linking to a relatively new article so we all can bypass the paywall is a solid circle.
Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.
I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?
The petition should be to ban the AI theft. If it is on wayback, the bots could as well scrape the NYT directly.
The NYT is of course guilty itself. It did not investigate the possible murder of its star witness Suchir Balaji and is too reserved in examining the consequences of AI in general.
If they don't fulfill their journalistic and societal obligations, soon its own journalists will be replaced by AI bullet point slop like Axios.
Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
I'm grown up now, I understand how things work, and I'd rather see Tide and Coke ads than pay $20/mo to 8 different orgs, while maintaining that ad free option for those who want it.
The children of the internet probably won't sign a truce, so let's just cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.
I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.
How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?
Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).
> How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
That era vastly predates the Internet, let alone the (relatively) ad-free pre-1980s Internet, neither of which we can return to in any meaningful fashion.
>cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
Ah, so, take the money out of it completely? No subscriptions, and no ads? Sounds like a good idea to me.
I'm fine with ads as long as they are integrated with the page. What I hate is the typical Google Adsense garbage where the same ad is plastered in 4 different places on the page, with a video ad playing in the corner, and if you're lucky, a popup ad as well.
> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
Nope, two problems
1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.
2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.
We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.
[dead]
[flagged]
After many years of these media outlets circling the drain, this is likely the clearest signal of their irrelevance. It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
And by what standards have you determined that these outlets are circling the drain?
The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.
More important than ever before and less market value than ever before. :(
It’s kind of shocking to read what you wrote, and realize those big media brands used to be independent journalism.
Are we considering the NYT and USA Today "independent journalism" still? Seems dubious...
I don't know about USA Today. NYT at least seems independent if left leaning. I've not seen them be unfairly biased or bend over backwards to cater to outside corporate interests just yet. They're certainly not bending the knee to the current administration.
They have a robust paying subscriber base that supports them and don't have an owner whose last name rhymes with Pesos who can axe a story just because he doesn't like what it says.
That a Democrat-leaning paper would criticize Republican politicians is not surprising. A better test of independence would be whether they criticize Democratic politicians (when they do things deserving criticism, that is: I don't expect them to criticize policy positions that they agree with, but all politicians do some things, in some cases many things, deserving of criticism).
> the clearest signal of their irrelevance
NYT had $2.82B in revenue in 2025.
> It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
I recommend you actually go and read those fiches. The press was not historically high quality. Mass media has had the same problems for decades.
What it used to have was genuine independent competition.
Wouldn’t it be better to let these legacy news orgs (which aren’t really anything beyond advertising and data harvesting firms) block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under? I’m struggling to think of a reason I need NY Times. I’ve never had a subscription and never seen writing that I thought benefited me as a citizen (they’re Very pro-war of any kind).
> block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under?
…why would they go under if the people who don’t pay for news stop reading them?
Media influence and authority has historically depended on getting cited by writing that is more directly relevant to the reader's concern (i.e. the topic of research).
The paywalls were one thing, but disallowing archival is practically suicide.
if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.
The title freaked me out. I thought this was about the Wayback Machine going away but no, it's just news publications blocking being archived.
I guess I don't really care. As soon as it becomes unworkable to view these publications through archivers I'll just stop viewing them altogether. I don't see this helping their bottom line though.
As long as other people are reading them, they're important for understanding what's happening in the world and what information the public is getting, which is why we need an accessible archive of their content.
Exactly. Libraries have kept microfiche archives of newspapers for forever, and they're an essential part of historical research.
They also preserved old books. But now I guess they're becoming middlemen for access to limited ebook platforms that ensure books disappear when publishers lose interest.
The "Information Age" is proving to be the setup for a dark age, when nonprofitable things are just thrown out and efforts to preserve them are actively fought.
I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.
Archives protect truth