universally publicly-funded endeavor
History has always been in the hands of the victors. We’ve finally created a significant exception. But, status quo society doesn’t want the responsibility of reasoning out their own decisions or understanding those of others. They’ll believe it best to hand their power back to their oppressors. Even if they believe their oppressors “good”, they’re choosing to enslave greatness to democratic mediocrity. Anything but personal sacrifice.
If you’re implying that an essential service should be managed by a private company instead of the government, I’d like you to take a look at the other services we have that are privatized… Like Internet providers and healthcare providers. People are dying because saving them is not profitable. And Comcast absolutely will throttle your connection for their own benefit.
If the Internet archive ever became for-profit, it would absolutely ruin the value of it to the public.
All of which are heavily based on open source software, donations, and in the case of wikipedia, user generated and moderated content.
The solution is not centralization. It’s decentralization. A decentralized internet archive could not be held accountable, or taken down, by any individual government. It will remain active and fault tolerant as long as enough users keep enough storage allocated to maintain replication and redundancy. One architected with zero knowledge encryption as the backbone (e.g. IPFS + I2P) could even operate within the jurisdiction of hostile governments.
