At Wayback to the Future: Celebrating the Open Web in Washington D.C., some of the internet’s founding figures gathered to reflect on what went wrong—and what might still be saved.

Hosted by the Foundation for American Innovation in the historic Riggs Library at Georgetown University, the panel brought together Vint Cerf (Google), Cindy Cohn (EFF), Jon Stokes (Ars Technica), and the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle.

Listen to the discussion via the Future Knowledge podcast:

Watch the discussion:

The conversation, moderated by Luke Hogg, focused on what the group called the “three Cs” behind the web’s decline: centralization, copyright, and competition. While the early web promised connection and creativity, today’s internet, they warned, is increasingly fragmented, paywalled, and dominated by a few powerful platforms.

Speaking beneath shelves of century-old books, Brewster Kahle posed a simple but urgent question: “Do we have these books on the internet anywhere?” His answer—“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free”—captured the tension at the heart of the conversation.

As libraries and users lose access to information locked behind corporate and legal barriers, Kahle called for a renewed commitment to an open, decentralized web: “Let’s have a game with many winners.”

The Internet Archive, now having preserved over one trillion webpages, continues to model that vision by building a more resilient, distributed digital library—one where knowledge remains accessible to all.

One trillion! There was no mistaking the number that was center stage at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on October 22.

“We are celebrating a major goal of one trillion web pages…shared by people all over the world, wanting to make sure that what they know is passed on,” said Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “It’s a fantastic, phenomenal success story.”

Watch the livestream:

Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been saving the digital history of the internet. In October, it surpassed the threshold of preserving one trillion web pages—a fact that was met with enthusiastic applause each time it was mentioned at the party held at the non-profit research library’s Funston Avenue headquarters in San Francisco.

People should not take for granted the important role that libraries, including the Internet Archive, have played in compiling accurate information and making it accessible to all, said California State Senator Scott Weiner, who presented a Certificate of Recognition from the State of California Senate to the Internet Archive. “We’re seeing now in this country people trying to rewrite history and come up with alternative facts,” he said at the event. “What the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine does is to make clear that everything is there. I am so deeply grateful.” [watch remarks]

In a video message, Vint Cerf, creator of the Internet and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, said the one-trillion-page mark is an incredible milestone. “[The Internet Archive] has preserved an enormous amount of history over the course of their data collection, something which I feel is absolutely essential,” he said. “In the absence of what they have done, the 22nd century will have no clue what the 21st Century was all about.”

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

The program included a glimpse back at early days of the web and a hopeful vision for the future.

“There was this dream of an internet that was made for us, by us, to be able to make us better people,” Kahle said. “Yes, using technology. Yes, having games with lots of different players and winners—a fun and interesting world, and that is very much still within our grasp.”

Audrey Witters, a veteran of the early web, brought the audience back to 1994—when all existing websites could still fit on a single “What’s New” page. Reflecting on her early days at NCSA and her creative experiments on GeoCities, Witters shared the story of how a small animated alien GIF she helped create became an unlikely icon of the early web. “It’s so important for us to remember that context, that spirit, that joy of creation—what happens when you give people the tools and invitation to publicly and exuberantly celebrate themselves,” she said. Thanking the Internet Archive for preserving that era’s spirit of discovery and collaboration, Witters urged the next generation of creators “to look for new opportunities to promote exploration, collaboration, and joyful expression. Here’s to the next trillion!”

Lily Jamali, an investigative journalist with BBC News, said she appreciates the Archive’s public service mission and tools that are “absolutely fundamental” to hold the powerful to account. “They help us journalists fact check claims,” she said from the Great Room stage. “They help us see how companies and governments may have selectively edited online materials, or even deleted statements or social media posted that they would rather that the public didn’t see.” [watch remarks]

Journalists can no longer rely on their news outlets to store their work, Jamali said, so many turn to the Wayback Machine to access past articles and inform their reporting.

In a highly entertaining segment full of Wikipedia screen shots and laughs, Annie Rauwerda, creator of Depths of Wikipedia, spoke about the crucial partnership between Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. She highlighted how archived pages make citations stronger and more durable by ensuring that even when the original source disappears, the evidence remains. “If Wikipedia is worth anything at all, it’s because of the citations,” Rauwerda said.

CEO of National Public Radio Katherine Maher offered her congratulations via video for the event. “One trillion web pages. That’s one trillion artifacts and snapshots of our interconnected world,” she said. “It’s a testament to the Internet Archives’ unwavering commitment to safeguarding the integrity of the open web and its history, ensuring that this vast digital record remains free and open for everyone.”

NPR and the Internet Archive share a deep commitment to providing access to information, a dedication to public service and a belief in strengthening societies through information and dialog, Maher said. “We live today in an era in which information is unstable. It emerges suddenly, decays rapidly, disappears instantly,” she said. “In this moment, the Archive’s role in preserving news, public discourse and our shared stories is more critical than ever.”

With Wayback Machine, ‘Knowledge Will Not Be Lost’

When the U.S. government websites started going offline after the change in presidential administrations earlier this year, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, said he wasn’t panicking. Why? Because since 2004 the Internet Archive has collaborated with many partners to save federal web pages, through the End of Term Web Archive effort. Since last fall, Graham described efforts to preserve more than 400 million web pages, 2 million videos and hundreds of thousands of data sets—all published by the U.S. government, and therefore available to the public. [watch remarks]

With the Wikimedia Foundation, the Archive has identified and fixed more than 28 million broken links from Wikipedia. It also added more than 4.2 million links to books and papers available from www.archive.org. Graham announced the new partnership with Automattic Inc. to make it easy for WordPress operators to automatically find and repair broken links with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer.

The Internet Archive faces challenges with the advent of AI. More services are blocking access, Graham said, making it harder for memory institutions, like the Internet Archive, to do their  jobs—yet, the team remains diligent in its efforts.

“We’re going to keep on building the library that the world deserves, one that remembers, one that connects us, and one that ensures no matter how much the web changes, that knowledge will not be lost,” Graham said.

The Path Forward

Luca Messarra, a humanities scholar and educator at Stanford University, said preserving webpages is important because the past is always shaping the present moment. “History is essential because it helps us understand how our own lives came to be. But more importantly, for me, history helps us understand how our lives can be made different,” he said. “The past tells us that the present does not need to be the way that it is.” [watch remarks]

Messarra said he has used resources from the Internet Archive to write conference papers, recover his old chat messaging history and recover a favorite family biscuit recipe.

“The Wayback Machine has tended to one trillion seeds that will nourish our future. All that remains is for us to harvest and use them,” Messarra said. “One trillion pages are one trillion opportunities to change our present moment. That requires that we look at the past not with nostalgia, but with initiative.”

The largest repository of internet history ever assembled is possible thanks to thousands of donations to the Internet Archive and 200,000 unique donors, said Joy Chesbrough, director of philanthropy. At the event, she announced a new campaign that encourages individuals to create their own fundraising teams to support the Internet Archive. See https://donate.archive.org/1t [watch remarks]

It was the largest gathering for the Archive’s annual party in years, said Chris Freeland, director of library services, and he hoped the gathering fostered a sense of connection.

“It was a nostalgic throwback, but it also showed people a path forward for a web that we want,” Freeland said. “I hope people come away with this sense of optimism and a thought that this is our web, and we can be in control of it again.”

Internet Archive x Gray Area: Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions
Date: Saturday, November 1
Time: 5:00 to 8:00pm
Location: Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Admission: Free
REGISTER NOW!

The Internet Archive has reached an extraordinary milestone: one trillion web pages archived. This civilization-scale achievement marks decades of dedication to preserving the ephemeral nature of digital culture and ensuring universal access to human knowledge.

To commemorate this historic moment, San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area has partnered with the Internet Archive to commission a series of original net.art works that engage with the vast holdings of the Internet Archive and explore what it means to create, preserve, and access culture online.

REGISTER NOW

Commissioned Artists

• Chia Amisola
• Spencer Chang
• Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin
• Ophira Horwitz
• Mai Ishikawa-Sutton & Raúl Feliz
• Olivia McKayla Ross
• Jesse Walton
• Rodell Warner

The commissioned artists have drawn from the Internet Archive’s expansive collections to create web-based artworks that reflect on themes of memory, digital archaeology, and the human stories embedded within preserved data. These works exist as both online experiences and physical installations at the Internet Archive, bridging the digital and material worlds in ways that honor the Archive’s dual nature as both a technological achievement and a profoundly human endeavor.

Curated by Amir Esfahani (Internet Archive) and Wade Wallerstein (Gray Area)

Celebrating 1 trillion web pages archived, the Internet Archive is proud to honor the visionary who made it all possible. As announced in The New Yorker, this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, whose groundbreaking work opened the door to a connected world and laid the foundation for our shared digital history.

The Internet Archive Hero Award is an annual award that recognizes those who have exhibited leadership in making information available for digital learners all over the world. Previous recipients have included the island nation of Aruba, public information advocate Carl Malamud, copyright expert Michelle Wu, and the Grateful Dead.

Sir Tim’s invention transformed how humanity shares knowledge, and his ongoing advocacy for an open and accessible web that empowers individuals continues to inspire us. We’re thrilled to recognize his enduring contributions as we mark this historic achievement for the web.

Sir Tim will receive the Hero Award at an event in San Francisco on October 9, and will be celebrated from afar during the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 22, “The Web We’ve Built.”

We’re thrilled to see how much our hope for DWeb to decentralize globally has been fulfilled this year. In our blog announcing the Core team’s decision to take a hiatus from holding DWeb Camp in California, our Senior Organizer Wendy Hanamura wrote:

[It] is time to put our energy into truly decentralizing DWeb. We want to nurture this movement in a way that empowers nodes around the world, especially those outside of the United States. We want to focus our energies in 2025 on helping local networks build capacity and grow. 

In 2025, we held gatherings in Taipei and Berlin before a summer jam-packed with DWeb happenings: DWeb was at What Hackers Yearn in the Netherlands, HOPE_16 in New York, along with the intensive, hands-on week of p2p and local-first protocol learning at the DWeb Seminar SF & Weekend (stay tuned for more writing to come from that).

And of course, DWeb Camp Cascadia, organized by the stellar folks of the DWeb YVR Node. By the spring, we had been hearing murmurs of their planning the event. It all came together when they decided to hold it early August on beautiful Salt Spring Island, a 45-minute drive and 90-minute ferry ride from Vancouver. This was only the second camp outside of California since DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil in 2023. 

For anyone who was there in 2019 at DWeb Camp at the Mushroom Farm — it felt so much like our first DWeb. It was held at the Farmers’ Institute, which is regularly used for an annual farmer’s fair for the whole island. About 60 participants in total attended throughout the weekend. An informal polling (raised hands during the opening) showed that about 40% of attendees traveled from the US, with the remaining 60% from Canada — several of whom live on Salt Spring Island itself. It spoke volumes that the local attendees really enjoyed the event while having various interests: from regenerative agriculture and responsible land stewardship to music and web development.

The event kicked off on Friday evening with remarks from Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, whose federal electoral district spans across seven islands, including Salt Spring Island. As leader of Canada’s Green Party, May’s team is working to shape Canada’s upcoming AI legislation. She first gave an acknowledgement of the ancient indigenous history of where we were and its colonization. Then she called attention to Big Tech’s ongoing global dominance, and the recent occurrence of the democratically decided Digital Services Tax having been scrapped by the Canadian Prime Minister over tariff negotiations with the U.S. Following her speech, I (mai), gave a history of the DWeb events and shared the DWeb Principles, with campers getting up to read each of the five principles. Campers then got into small groups to discuss them, with a few of them coming up to share their own reflections.

Saturday and Sunday were packed with talks, discussions, and workshops. Unlike the main DWeb Camp where we have many concurrent tracks, mornings were a single track of programming followed by afternoons with three parallel unconference sessions. DWeb Camp Cascadia’s cornerstone themes were decentralization, democracy, open social networks, regenerative agriculture, and included community talks by local technologists living in and around Salt Spring Island.

Brooklyn Zelenka of Ink & Switch and spec editor for the UCAN distributed RPC and auth system, gave an excellent talk Saturday morning introducing local-first technologies and the affordances of networks that prioritize local, people-centric connectivity. Brooklyn described how big data “cloud” services centralize infrastructure in a way that always requires connectivity (such as when you can no longer edit a Google document when you lose internet access). Offering a powerful metaphor, Brooklyn suggested most services today rely on networks that act more like a military aircraft carrier, when many personal or local services could act more like a bike — nimble, resilient, and scaled down to meet the unique needs of individuals. You can check out the recording of the August DWeb Virtual meetup where she gave the same presentation. 

There was a cornerstone session for the Open Social Web, led by Nigini Oliviera (DWeb Seattle Node lead) and featured Ian Davis, Matthew Lorentz and Mike Waggooner, each discussing their work with ATProtocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr. They discussed the differences between social media protocols and how each of them hold potential for new apps to be built on them.

Jacob Sayles of Cascadia Collaborative Design gave a workshop on Meshtastic radios. All over the world there has been a growing popularity of LoRa (Long-Range) devices, particularly with the release of Meshtastic software that is increasingly making it easier for anyone to send short, SMS/text-length messages to those nearby. It’s completely decentralized in that it requires no dedicated router and enables messages to hop from device-to-device to go to its intended recipient(s). In practical terms, it’s currently most useful for emergency situations and other situations as an alternative to mobile and internet connectivity. While messages are encrypted, there are still privacy issues with the software/hardware that make it less useful for privacy-sensitive uses. 

Some of the unconference sessions included:

• What would a decentralized iNaturalist look like?
• Bioregional learning and digital tech
• Robotics without data centers
• AI safety and how to dwebbify AI
• Conscious use of AI by appreciating artisanship
• Clean tech + climate tech
• “Privacy party” — sponsoring network effects
• Fractal cells + self-organizing
• How to contain sociopaths
• Practical local-first
• Pretzel and quark cheese making
• Gymnastics + parkour

In addition to these sessions, what made the gathering feel like a DWeb Camp were the other activities throughout the weekend: yoga in the mornings, visits to local regenerative farms, and a hike through redwoods to swim in the ocean.

On the first night there was an impromptu karaoke session backed by acoustic guitar played by Paul d’Aoust and cajon played by Nigini Oliviera. On Saturday night we had a dance party and on Sunday night — as may now be tradition — an open mic that featured nine campers showing off their music and comedy.

What I often hear from campers year-to-year is that DWeb is exactly the kind of community they were looking for. People who are deeply engaged with what it means to design and build values-based technologies, who are also themselves people who clearly understand what it means to listen and take care of each other. Along with our curiosity and passion for how we can build better networks, campers are able to integrate that focus with how we are as people — how we want to be better in our communities and the lands we live on. At a time when mainstream technologies seem intent on stripping away our humanity with their use, cultivating these spaces not only feels critical, it’s exhilarating. 

On the ferry ride back from Salt Spring Island, members of the DWeb YVR Node were already starting to discuss plans to organize it again for next year with more campers. As someone who’s been involved in DWeb Camp from the beginning, I will say that seeing this event grow feels incredibly affirming: that there’s a need and desire to bring together in-person those ready and able to build  better digital networks during these turbulent times. 

~

This blog post has been written by mai ishikawa sutton, Senior Organizer of DWeb and member of the DWeb Core Team. Learn more about DWeb at: https://getdweb.net/

This October, the Internet Archive will celebrate an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine.

The series of events scheduled throughout October will highlight the people, technology, and community efforts that have made this achievement possible, and will look ahead to the future of web preservation as we continue building the web’s collective memory together.

Oct 7 – The Vast Blue We: An interactive evening of live music with Del Sol Quartet, featuring new works by Erika Oba and Sam Reider, exploring the wonder of human collaboration. (7–8:15pm PT | San Francisco & online) — Learn more & register

Oct 21 – Doors Open 2025: Go behind the scenes at the Physical Archive to see the lifecycle of books, records, film, and more—from donation to digitization. (6–8pm PT | In person only) — Learn more & register

Oct 22 – The Web We’ve Built: Our annual celebration, marking 1 trillion webpages preserved in the Wayback Machine. Join us in San Francisco or online for an evening of talks, performances, and community. (5–10pm PT | Live stream 7–8pm PT) — Learn more & register

This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That’s one trillion memories, moments, and movements—preserved for the public, forever.

We’ll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event: a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it’s a tribute to what we’ve built together: a free and open digital library of the web.

Join us in marking this incredible milestone. Together, we’ve built the largest archive of web history ever assembled. Let’s celebrate this achievement—in San Francisco and around the world—on October 22.

Here’s how you can take part:

1. RSVP
Sign up now to be the first to know when registration opens for our in-person event and livestream.
RSVP now

2. Support the Internet Archive
Help us continue preserving the web for generations to come.
Donate today!

3. Share Your Story
What does the web mean to you? How has the Wayback Machine helped you remember, research, or recover something important?
Submit your story

Let’s work together toward October 22—a day to look back, share stories, and celebrate the web we’ve built and preserved together.

In late February, members of the DWeb Core Team and the DWeb community were in Taipei to attend the 13th edition of RightsCon, the largest global summit on human rights in the digital age. Namely, we were there to connect with the digital rights community. We wanted to participate in an event where thousands of people travel from around the world to discuss the current and future state of the internet, and to meet others who were involved in building decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer network technologies.

Thus we took the opportunity to organize activities before and during the conference: a local networking workshop co-organized with g0v, sessions on both DWeb organizing and how fiction can better depict surveillance technologies, a DWeb dinner, as well as a final day of tabling in the halls of the venue.

DWeb x g0v Local Network Workshop 

We partnered with g0v, the leading decentralized civic technology community in Taiwan, to co-organize an event focused on local community networks at the National Taipei University of Technology. When we met with them several months ago, g0v leaders told us that they wanted to connect with those building and stewarding community networks. Such networks are controlled directly by communities, especially in places where internet access is non-existent or undermined, in order to maintain local network services and ensure internet connections are available or affordable. In Taiwan, these types of decentralized network infrastructures are a potential lifeline, as internet shutdowns in the country remain an ever-present threat.

Our event, “Building Resilient Connections: A Hands-on Local Network Workshop” dove into the core concepts of community networks, their technical setups, and the ways they’re making a difference in under-served communities worldwide.

We had a great turnout: attended by more than 35 people. Since we had a survey built into our registration form, we knew what topics the participants were interested in learning about and tailored the workshop to them. These included community networks’ key challenges and opportunities, technical overview and tools, and issues surrounding their ethics, privacy and security. 

Notably, we had community network leaders from Myanmar, Taiwan, and Indonesia present case studies on their community networks, from the technologies they use to the ways they govern and manage the networks. We were lucky to be able to bring Michael Suantak to lead the presentations and the workshop on locally-hosted services. He was a 2024 DWeb Fellow, but for visa reasons he was not able to attend DWeb Camp in person, so we were happy to learn from him in person! 

Sean of Mesh TWC also gave a presentation and workshop, as well as Gustaff H. Iskandar of Common Room who joined us from Indonesia. The sessions were not recorded, but you can view their notes and slides below (note: these are Google docs and Google slides).

Presentation by Michael Suantak

Presentation by Gustaff H. Iskandar (Common Room)

Presentation by Sean (Mesh TWC)

We ended with a few hands-on activities with Meshtastic LoRa devices and local-first services, as well as a discussion on the role of community networks in digital literacy and empowerment.

Attending RightsCon 2025

RightsCon brings over 3,000 people from all corners of the globe to discuss the most pressing concerns facing people’s digital rights today. At a sprawling convention center in Taipei, hundreds of sessions took place across the last week of February, on issues related to free expression, privacy, and innovation and creativity online — specifically surrounding organizing tactics, policy advocacy, and sustaining movements in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide. There was also notable interest in decentralized web solutions to these crises, with sessions led by DWeb Camp attendees, the Social Web Foundation, Equalitie, Project Liberty, Open Future, WITNESS, Open Archive, and Creative Commons.

Round Table DWeb Workshop

We led a workshop discussion on strategies for decentralized, transnational organizing. Approximately 25 people attended and came to learn about the DWeb community. We shared our approach to building trust and solidarity between projects and individuals working to create a decentralized web that is usable, secure, and people-centric, all in spite of the exploitative and profit-driven status quo of the Internet. We spent the hour strategizing effective tactics for transnational organizing. Namely, how to use in-person and online gatherings to organize, share resources, and build enduring connections to strengthen our efforts.

Stop Surveillance Copaganda Workshops

Lia Holland of Fight for the Future and I co-facilitated three workshops on the Stop Surveillance Copaganda project, a partnership between Fight For the Future and COMPOST Magazine. The discussions centered around how we better support fiction that depicts futures and alternate realities where privacy is a universally respected human right. Attendees shared useful resources and analyses of surveillance tech’s impacts, as well as real-world tactics to resist illegal surveillance. Everything we gleaned from that week will go into a toolkit for authors and artists to more justly depict surveillance technologies. 

RightsCon Booth 

We signed up to table at RightsCon in order to introduce ourselves to the digital rights community and meet those working to build alternative, decentralized technologies. Dozens of new and familiar faces stopped by to grab our stickers and zines, and to learn about what the DWeb community has been doing to build our movement.

DWebbers Dinner

Mid-conference, we organized a DWeb hot pot dinner for those of us in town for the event!

Attending RightsCon this year felt incredibly productive and worthwhile. We’ll likely be there at the next one — in order to build better webs and learn from the past, it’s crucial that we connect with those directly confronting the pervasive challenges of the mainstream internet. That has always been our north star: to build decentralized technologies that help solve real world problems, not just in the future, but now.

Guests arrived in true 1920s fashion, riding in a vintage convertible before stepping onto the red carpet, where they were met by the spirited Raining Chainsaws street theater troupe, who transformed into a fleet of eager, old-time paparazzi—flashing cameras, barking questions, and adding a touch of whimsy and Hollywood magic to the night.

Check out photos from the red carpet!

Inside the Internet Archive, attendees sipped on French 75s and Old-Fashioneds, classic cocktails that transported us back to the final, glittering moments of the Roaring Twenties. The theme of the night? 1929—the year of the very first Academy Awards—and we honored this cinematic milestone with an evening of film, history, and remixing of the past.

Lecture by George Evelyn on Disney’s The Skeleton Dance
Animation historian George Evelyn enlightened the audience with a viewing of The Skeleton Dance, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. With its pioneering use of synchronized sound and animation, the 1929 short was a perfect reminder of how creativity from the past continues to shape the present.

Public Domain Film Remix Contest Screening
What happens when today’s creators remix yesterday’s masterpieces? Our Public Domain Film Remix Contest showcased the most inventive reinterpretations of public domain classics, where old Hollywood met modern storytelling in unexpected and thrilling ways. View all the winners, honorable mentions and submissions from this year’s contest.

Watch the livestream of the night’s festivities

As the evening came to a close, guests toasted to the future of open culture, celebrating the power of preservation, creativity, and the public domain. Thank you to everyone who joined us for this dazzling night of history, cinema, and community!