I suppose there is always archive.org and wikipedia, but the more we rely on those to keep old content around the more worried I get about single points of failure. I remember when I first went online in the 90’s the vision of the internet was decentralized content, where information would never go away once it was pushed online. The reality is that the internet is now a decentralized network of central depots, with information rarely jumping between those central depots, and with old layers of content shedding off the edge of those depots and falling into the abyss.

Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far from that 90’s vision.