As Donald Trump careens towards the Oval Office,
promising jail time for flag-burners
along the way, an organization that archives the internet for anyone to
peruse aims to create a full backup in Canada in order to protect the
digital library from censorship.
The Internet Archive is a
US-based nonprofit that has been archiving the web for 20 years. So far,
they’ve cataloged petabytes worth of web pages and claim to continue to
archive 300 million new web pages each week. Their massive database
allows the organization to run services like
the Wayback Machine, which anyone can use to visit an archived version of most web pages, sometimes dating back years.
The group prefers to refer to itself as a kind of library, and as it
noted in a blog post on Tuesday,
“the history of libraries is one of loss,” whether through natural
disaster or political regime change. With a potentially pro-censorship
Trump regime looming, the Internet Archive isn’t taking any chances and
is planning on opening an “Internet Archive of Canada” in the land of
toques and Labatt brews. Digital information stored abroad wouldn’t be subject to US censorship laws.