Information is disappearing from the internet. Unlike printed books or newspapers, the web’s ephemeral nature means that pages — or, indeed, entire sites — often disappear and are lost for good. Top-down corporate control of information, on social media in particular, already posed a threat to the integrity of the internet as an archive. But the Trump administration’s efforts to remove information on government websites about a number of important topics, including gender, health, climate change, equity and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, even further highlight the need to support archival organizations that preserve what’s been posted online.
The Internet Archive is one such organization. Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library that provides free access to websites, software, movies and music, as well as books, documents, poems, essays and letters. Its mission is to “provide universal access to all knowledge.”
More than 28 years of web history have been preserved and are accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. To date, the Internet Archive contains more than 916 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and 1 million software programs.
The Archive also established Archive-It, which provides web archiving services to more than 800 organizations in 24 countries, including libraries, cultural memory and research institutions, social impact and community groups, and education and open knowledge initiatives. It has preserved more than 40 billion “born-digital, web-published records.”
In addition, the Internet Archive partners with the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative and Stanford University Libraries, and also offers the End of Term Web Archive, which has saved content from government sources at the end of each U.S. presidential term since 2008, according to a recent report from CNN.
The Internet Archive is funded through individual donations, grants from philanthropic and government institutions, and by providing web archiving and book digitization services for its partners. Here’s a quick overview of who’s backing the Internet Archive and why keeping this resource alive is so important right now.
The funders supporting the Internet Archive
By far the biggest single funder backing the Archive is the Kahle-Austin Foundation, which has given it $13.5 million between 2003 and 2024, according to data from Candid. The foundation is the philanthropic vehicle of Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive and serves as its head librarian, and his wife, Mary Austin, who founded the San Francisco Center for the Book. The two organizations are the foundation’s primary recipients.
Besides its founder, another top Internet Archive funder is the Mellon Foundation, through its Public Knowledge program. Mellon’s aim there is to create and preserve the cultural and scholarly record that “documents society’s complex, intertwined humanity” and to increase equitable access to deep knowledge that can help build an informed and civically engaged society. As perhaps the nation’s leading humanities foundation, Mellon is a major backer of archives and presses, as well as university, public, local, national and global libraries.
The Internet Archive has also received support from funders of scientific research and research integrity such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which awarded grants to the site through its now completed Universal Access to Knowledge program. Other science funders include the National Science Foundation, the Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and Arnold Ventures.
A number of journalism, media and democracy funders have awarded grants to the Internet Archive, including the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations and Democracy Fund.
Other funders include more big players like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Ford Foundation as well as Acton Family Giving and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation.
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Archiving government pages before they’re gone
The Internet Archive has been of critical importance since President Donald Trump again took office. One of his first acts was to issue an executive order declaring the federal government only recognizes two sexes. Shortly thereafter, the Office of Personnel Management ordered all government agencies to remove web pages, social media accounts and other public media that had references to “gender ideology.”
Pages from government health websites, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and Health and Human Services, that included terms like “transgender,” “LGBT,” and “pregnant people” were deleted, as well as information related to how racism affects health outcomes, contraception guidelines, and pages on adult vaccination information, according to the New York Times.
Other executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and changes to government efforts regarding energy and the environment also led the Office of Personnel Management to direct departments to remove references to DEI, racial equity, race, climate change and sustainability from government websites. Since then materials, documents and guides on DEI have been deleted from federal government pages, including from the Department of Education. Pages on climate change and sustainability on the websites of the White House, State Department, Department of Transportation and USDA have also been removed.
The new administration has also been taking down data sets from the U.S. Government’s Open Data initiative. As of February 19, there were 306,686 data sets available, down from the 307,851 data sets that were available January 19, as captured on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Perhaps even more alarming, the Department of Justice deleted a database that contained detailed information related to the prosecution of rioters responsible for the January 6 attacks. Video evidence from the Justice Department’s case against one January 6 rioter who pleaded guilty also disappeared from public access. A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit brought forward by a press coalition ordered the government to cease the removal of any videos or court records related to January 6.
The removal of records and evidence related to January 6, the disappearance of data sets and the deletion of information on subjects the Trump administration disapproves of, are part of the ongoing attacks against information, knowledge and facts — an ill portent of what may be on the horizon over the next four years.
For now, the Internet Archive is an invaluable tool to preserve information that the government may wish to scrub from the internet. Many of the government web pages that have been deleted are preserved on the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive, however, has been under pressure. Last year, it lost a lawsuit filed by book publishers and is currently being sued by two major music labels. It is possible that the Trump administration may also target the archive. With that in mind, philanthropic funding to preserve the archive — or even defend it, if it comes to that — is vital.
