The largest media companies are now blocking access
However, the Wayback Machine’s objective is increasingly facing problems. As Wired points out in an article, there are more and more providers blocking access. While content behind a paywall is not accessible anyway, 23 high-reach news sites have even blocked the crawlers completely. However, this does not always happen as a direct measure against the archive service. USA Today, for example, explains in a statement that it generally prevents any kind of scraping bots from doing their work – it is definitely not aimed specifically at the Wayback Machine.
Petition: Wayback Machine should be recognized as a cultural asset
A joint petition from more than 100 journalists is currently demanding that the service be respected as a valuable and important tool and that the crawler be granted access. The Wayback Machine is often indispensable for research purposes because information can be looked up that would otherwise have been forgotten. Be it because operators delete content, or because a portal has discontinued the service – many original sources simply disappear over time.
USA Today blocks – and proves the importance of the service
An example: USA Today recently published an article in which the methods of the US immigration agency ICE were analyzed and placed in historical context. This made it possible to use concrete data to prove how much the course changed under Trump. This is exactly what the difficult situation shows: on the one hand, facts were referred to that would no longer have existed without the Wayback Machine, and on the other hand, the offer was prevented from subsequently archiving the articles. This must be solved differently, according to the demands.