They produce something of value and the standard way of making that happen in our society is to ask customers to pay. This enables them to put up the means of production and for example pay journalists and engineers.
Most of the work I do is also not free.
It can be both. Public goods don’t have to be accessible to everyone to benefit society.
I’d be troubled by that if they were also taking public money to do so (ie state subsidy), but they aren’t. So what they claim is kinda meh.
Internet Archive is slow as hell. That would be a miserable way to read the Times. There are various higher performance ways to achieve the same result (eg disabling JavaScript for nytimes.com).
Ok now I understand so many of the replies in this thread.
For anyone else reading thei who doesn’t know: Internet Archive is archive.org aka the Wayback Machine. It takes like 10 seconds to load a page but has years old versions of pages.