That's a real shame. I am involved with some history-related projects and the number of websites which go offline is huge, and the wayback machine is incredibly helpful for unearthing these dead sites.

It is not hard to imagine a future in 50 years time where a huge percentage of this content is lost forever, or at best incredibly hard to find.

This future is here already, policy makers have it locked up. Any person who remembers what microfiche is understands the magnitude of this problem of not having a trustworthy public record. If we extended public policy from the library era, the library of congress itself would be the Internet Archive.