[Air-l] re;INTERNATIONAL INTERNET PRESERVATION, CONSORTIUM

elijah wright elw at stderr.org
Fri Jun 25 06:52:41 PDT 2004


> Finally, the most important issue in Internet Research cracks a mention
>
> In my opinion the two most critical innovations needed for the internet,
> from an internet researchers point of view, are 1. the need for complete
> recording and archiving of ALL webpages and

> Even from the point of view of all the social researchers out there, I
> would imagine the resource that should be available from all the
> individual homepages is a huge treasure that should be retained, yet is
> being lost daily.
>
> I believe that every webpage, except for those who explicitly opt out,
> should be archived at least once a month by a global organisation with
> governments and large companies benefitting from the internet
> contributing to the cost of this exercise and with open public access.
> Anything less than this is not worth bothering with.

this is most likely never going to happen.  the web is just too darn big.
and most of the web is not that important.

technical reasons aside, the web *socially* isn't set up to work this way.

decentralized services (the web) do not lend themselves well *at all* to
centralized control (archival).  who's going to regulate the collection of
the list of sites that need to be archived?  ha!  what a nightmare.

if people want to see something archived, they're just going to have to do
it themselves.  that's what brewster kahle is more-or-less doing with the
internet archive and via interaction with the digital library of
alexandria project, though i'm not at all sure he'd say that 'long term
archival' is an explicit goal.



> 2. the need for the implementation of a royalty payment system for
>    producers of small to medium sized websites.

> Issue number 2 - as stated above I believe there should be a royalty
> system for those who operate small to medium websites based on the
> accesses to their website. Technically possible - I think so. Capable of
> being set up without excessive fraud - probably Of benefit to the
> internet's diversity - definitely.

this is a recapitulation of the "micropayments" schemes that float around
from time to time.  wholly impractical, in the eyes of most of the
infrastructure folks who would have to roll out an implementation.  good
luck in trying to turn web sites into a profit center rather than a cost
center, though.

see http://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/ for links.

elijah




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