Overview
- The Fight for the Future petition, which Wired first reported Monday, has now drawn more than 120 journalist signatures urging publishers to restore the archive’s access.
- The Wayback Machine, a web archive that saves snapshots of pages, is being blocked by 23 major news sites and restricted across 241 outlets worldwide, with 87% of those sites owned by USA Today Co.
- The New York Times is hard blocking Internet Archive crawlers and added archive.org_bot to its robots.txt in late 2025, while The Guardian limits access to article pages and Reddit previously blocked the bot.
- Publishers say they aim to stop AI firms from scraping their stories to train models, pointing to past findings that Internet Archive pages appeared in training datasets and to a mass-scraping incident that overloaded Archive servers.
- Journalists and digital-rights groups warn the clampdown erodes a key public record used for fact-checking and court evidence, and the Internet Archive says talks with blocked outlets continue without a public resolution.