As reported by Nieman Lab last month, some major media organizations—including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reddit—have started blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving their sites over unfounded concerns about AI scraping.

Last week, tech writer Mike Masnick (Techdirt) explained why this is “a mistake we’re going to regret for generations.”

Today, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, has published a response to the Nieman Lab reporting, pushing back on the media organizations’ concerns about the Wayback Machine being a backdoor to AI scraping. Graham writes:

“These concerns are understandable, but unfounded… like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse.”

Read the post to learn how Graham is working to protect the integrity of the Wayback Machine, and why limiting web archiving threatens our shared digital history.