I found the article “The Cobweb” to be an interesting treatment of an important issue–how we can prevent the data on the Internet from being lost. The dilemma of how to archive information on the Internet is yet another consequence of the shortsightedness of not making the Internet more government-regulated when it was created. Furthermore, who knows if a non-profit organization like archive.org will still be able to archive the Internet 50 years from now; the article stated that just in the last two years the size of the archive grew from 10 to 20 petabytes.

Perhaps a good solution would be for governments, instead of ICANN, to be in charge of top-level domain names and to be in charge of keeping accurate archives of all sites created using those domain names. Or perhaps before a page can be hosted on the Internet, it should pass through a central authority that will register it on the archive to start being recorded. Of course, any solution will be a tradeoff between liberty and effectiveness, but this is an issue that is worth addressing if we care about preserving the history of our civilization.