Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

I just wonder, is archive.org getting any government grant money? If they aren't they should. And I'm not even talking about just the US. All sorts of countries (US, UK, Germany - to name the few) and international organisations like EU pour hundreds of millions into "cultural projects" of very questionable value.

How about they actually fund something really worthy of preservation? Of course it is archive.org role to reach out first. For example EU could fund an archive.org mirror in the EU (with certain throughout etc).

Of course opponents of public/government funding have a very good point in that many organisations when they get public money, they find a way to burn through all of it in a lot less efficient way. This can be mitigated by attaching concrete conditions to the grants. One example is a mirror in a specific location.

View on HN

The Internet Archive lists some of their major donors on the About IA page:

https://archive.org/about/

Since they are a U.S. 501(c)(3), they also publish annual reports, which can be downloaded e.g., at the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

The Internet Archive has many smaller donors, too. I use the Archive frequently for a variety of purposes and derive immense value from it, so I donate to it every year.

Public money would also mean regulation and I doubt the IA wants to be regulated. They already see themselves apart from things like web standards given their approach to robots.txt [1]

1: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

There are various underfunded digital archives in the EU and elsewhere that have legal duties to preserve online content relating to their specific countries.

They may be "of very questionable value" to you but your solution to remove funding from them to channel it to a much wealthier organisation in a wealthier country is neither ethical, legal or practical.

I think he or she rather meant some other cultural projects than digital archives.

There are indeed lots of cultural projects that get funding, that I consider not that important in comparison, but of course those people involved would think different. (Opera for example is heavily subsidized)

Opera the theater or Opera the web browser?

What do you think?

For real? I am not against subsidicing art and culture, but I am against selective subsidicing. For example in germany there is a strong divide into "serious art" like opera and classical music that gets lots of money direct or indirectly - and trivial art, everyone else. Getting allmost nothing. So it boils down to taste and the favourite culture of the establishment. But there is so much other good music and performers besides the mainstream out there, who gets categorized into "entertainment" and have to struggle on their own.

So back on topic, I would be fine with taking money from opera to give it to internet archives. But of course, I rather would have more money for everyone involved in arts and culture.

This is almost completely unresponsive to what parent actually wrote.

Exactly. Maybe it’s good the IA stays out of government and politics stuff.

Not at all. The suggestion was to shift countries government funding from their own projects to a foreign, better funded initiative on the implied assumption they don't know what they are doing.

The suggestion was well-motivated but presumably guided by a lack of understanding of the existing digital landscape of international publicly funded projects and their obligations and constraints.

Government money would risk making them dependent on it, which would reduce their ability to be self sustainable and independent, which risks becoming political. Best avoided if possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com