Thanks for making me aware of this. This guy's heart is clearly (to me) in the right place, but his understanding of power is seriously lacking. That's probably what gave him the hubris to create Wayback and IA, but he'll be absolutely dumbstruck when they shut it down.
He won't be surprised at all. His slogan is "governments burn libraries". He's been able to forestall that for a while, and even provide public access, but permanence of the IA as an institution was never in the cards, given its subversive goal: universal access to all human knowledge.
Guess where the first backup copy of the Internet Archive is located.
Libraries are funded by the government. They've been diligently scanning books for decades but nobody has had even the slightest interest in that until their favourite hackerman showed up. Libertarian god complex is so tiresome.
Some libraries are government-funded. Many are not.
That ranges from the personal book collection numbering from one to many thousands in private hands, private institutional libraries (the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco is one that comes to mind, many private universities and grammar schools have their own, as do numerous corporations, some of which are catalogued by Worldcat).
Preservation of Western culture, notably the Greek and Roman canons, as well as much literature and knowledge of the Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, occurred through religious institutions. Though in some regards those were the governments of the time. Indian, Chinese, and other further East Asian collections were preserved through multiple means.
Book digitisation at US academic institutions (the University of Michigan being a major contributor to both Google Books and HathiTrust) has had its own exctremely combative relationship with commercial publishers, as has the US Library of Congress, which issues US copyright in the first place.
I imagine there would be enough institutional support for the Way Back Machine from the likes of Wikipedia at least that even if the IA did go down the WBM would be carved off and kept alive. Effectively I think the IA will be broken up.
