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Vint Cerf, the godfather of the Internet, spoke in Sydney, Australia on Wednesday and issued a blunt call to action for a digital preservation regime for content and code to be quickly put in place to counter the existing throwaway culture that denies future generations an essential window into life in the past. He emphasized that this was especially needed for the WWW. Due to the volatile nature of electronic storage media as well as the format in which information is encoded, it is not possible to preserve digital material without prior planning and action.
[...] While the digital disappearance phenomenon is one which has so far mainly vexed official archivists and librarians for some years now, Cerf's take is that as everything goes from creation, the risk of accidental or careless memory loss increases correspondingly.
Archivists have for decades fought publicly for open document formats to hedge against proprietary and vendor risks – especially when classified material usually can only be made public after 30 to 50 years, sometimes longer.
From iTnews : Internet is losing its memory: Cerf
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:09PM
Well, the thing is related to what is a commodity in modern Internet. When in 1990s it was webpages business (making, maintaining, expanding), it was possible to use hosting, publish and read things published by other authors and even know authors by their style of writing. The thing not only did not wanted to disappear, but was repeated while being expanded. However, you can't do it if the "content" is not a knowledge, but a way to show advertisement (compare any modern "article" from well-established press with Usenet FAQ written by some anon from the forest!).
Now, after strict division between producers and consumers of "content" being usually only a media of advertisement, the commodity is the contact itself, so it is not advisable to preserve any knowledge - we have to, like a late primates, use "spoken word" transfer over a new media all time. Of course commodifying inter-human contact has some side effects like collapse of a normal contact, creating dangerous subcultures of politically excluded people who cannot be used in other way than just for gain or rise of fanaticism, but until contact can be monetized, dangerous groups shown as bad_child_abusing_drug_dealing_terrorists ( Not from USA, have I forgot about someone :) ) and fanatics used to spread propaganda it's a normal consequence of information-based free market.
In recent years my usage of Wayback Machine increased to over half of pages I look for information.