edit: adjusted title slightly
Google killed off their own cached pages last month and they’re now using IA as a replacement. Free linking is definitely important, but this is Google we’re talking about, and them using IA to save money - this feels a lot more exploitative if Google isn’t funding them in some way.
I think you’re both right. Anyone should be able to link to an IA page, but Google basically was doing the same thing as IA with their cached pages. Now they’ve gotten rid of that service and are simply relying on IA to take all of the load that they had. I think they should help fund IA to compensate for the extra load.
I agree they should. But I also agree they shouldn’t be required to. And if they don’t, that we should just live with it as the lesser of two evils.
I would argue regulation should come with (and typically be proportional to) scale. Google as an organization operates at an enormous scale. The scale of the amount links replaced with IA links will be large. The scale in amount in operational costs transferred to another organization is obviously worth it to Google. The sheer scale of everything and everyone involved should require Google to pay Internet Archive. In a decent world that is…
I had not realized that. They should absolutely be allowed to do it, but it’s super shitty of them to basically offload that cost onto IA. IA of course would be well within their rights to try and monetize it. Look at incoming traffic that deep links a cached page and has a Google.com referrer, and throw a splash page or top banner asking for donation.
