PUBLISHERS ARE BLOCKING THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 13, 2026, Article 26

Nothing ever stays the same. And in this case, that's not a good thing. Publishers (including some major numismatic companies) are adding technology to block AI companies from using their content. But in the throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater department, these changes are also blocking the ubiquitous Internet Archive. -Editor

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper.

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. The Archive's mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

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.

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive's crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use.

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for.

One lesser known activity of the Newman Numismatic Portal is archiving copies of hundreds of numismatic websites using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. A nontrivial percentage of these sites are already gone, and the NNP copies may be the only record of their existence. This is a core function of libraries, and especially important in the internet age. -Editor