Don't know if it helps your musings at all, but there's a good chance that if a high-profile crawler like archive.org disrespected their robots.txt, that archive.org would be faced with lawsuits (or some other form of pressure). This is not merely the most moral move; rather it is the only sensible move.

The only reason "others are rewarded with profit" in cases like these are because pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating.

Correct. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt:

    User-agent: archive.org_bot
    Disallow: /

No, archive.org does NOT respect robots.txt. You need to reach out to them directly and ask your site not be included: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

It's because they want to restrict AI companies from stealing content, but they can't do it if internet archive proxies it all for them.

All of the LLMs would be massively less useful if it wasn't for scraping the latest news.

> Idk.

Yeah.

Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.

It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.

The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.

In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.

I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.

I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.

> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future

In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.

Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.

How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?

How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?

Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).

I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.

I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.

>cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.

Ah, so, take the money out of it completely? No subscriptions, and no ads? Sounds like a good idea to me.

> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?

Nope, two problems

1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.

2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.

We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.

And by what standards have you determined that these outlets are circling the drain?

The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.

> the clearest signal of their irrelevance

NYT had $2.82B in revenue in 2025.

> It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.

I recommend you actually go and read those fiches. The press was not historically high quality. Mass media has had the same problems for decades.

What it used to have was genuine independent competition.

> block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under?

…why would they go under if the people who don’t pay for news stop reading them?

if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.

As long as other people are reading them, they're important for understanding what's happening in the world and what information the public is getting, which is why we need an accessible archive of their content.

Archives protect truth