Not a good idea for three reasons:
- the assumption that this will stop lawsuits is very generous, especially when we consider that there are other countries than the US that have lawyers and IP too
- putting such an important task in the hands of a government that might be controlled by whatever extremist possible in the future is a bad idea; who controls the past, controls the future and parties could delete parts of the past at their will
- a less dystopian thought: future governments might simply cut the funding or restrict the archive to US content only because “why shouod they pay for other contries’ history?”
A legislative approach that protects what the archive does would be a much more reasonable approach.
who controls the past, controls the future
I think the more relevant bit here is that whoever controls the present, controls the past.
Overall I agree with you: the government is not trustable to own and manage this service and especially all of the data itself.
I think legislative protection for this function is a good thing, to create a legal protected space for it to operate, while still having it actually operated by the private sector.
The ideal solution, IMO, is for the service to be decentralized onto a blockchain or some other kind of decentralized data store, and have a variable number of nodes running it in a redundant manner so that no single node’s loss leads to loss of data or the service itself.
This is a universal good, one I’d be happy to help “pay for” in the form of dedicating computing resources to it.
IMO all the functions of democracy (including in this case the maintenance of historical memory) should ideally be decentralized enough to be immune to attack by any organization up to and including armies.
Kinda sounds like we need a decentralized, feterated internet archive for at least each nation and maybe individuals… Or maybe I just want to federate almost everything ^^’
Edit: found a discussion here on that topic in the comments
Yes this is the answer. Split the data into many little chunks and have as many nodes as want to be involved acting as redundancies on the data.
Frequently publish the factor of safety in terms of data redundancy.
Would this be an application for blockchain or some other technology?
Yeah, and since our government doesn’t work, it’d be better for open source, transparent efforts by the people. That also reminds the assholes in govt that the internet “content” is not owned by those who built machines or the government’s investment in DARPAnet, but by the people. Turn it all into a blockchain or something so there are copies or at least fragments on a ton of computers around the world and is indelible.
