Internet Archive, Web’s Warehouse, Creating Trump-Era Copy in Canada
Yes, the Internet Archive — the “Wayback Machine” that’s home to hundreds of billions of dead or otherwise lost web pages — is heading to Canada.
And yes, President-elect Donald Trump is part of the reason.
“On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change,” founder Brewster Kahle wrote Tuesday in a fundraising message posted to the Internet Archive’s blog. “It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change.”
Kahle signaled something was afoot the day after Trump was elected, saying he was “shell-shocked” and soliciting advice for “what we might do.”
The answer, it turned out Tuesday, is to create a duplicate of the independent, nonprofit site — called a “mirror,” a path many sites pursue to ensure a backup, to lessen the load on servers or to skirt censorship.
Pundits and online commenters seized on the announcement to renew their attacks on the president-elect for what they have called his chilling effect on speech, suggesting the archive is fleeing the United States because of Trump.
