Why do you believe that a website would want the Internet Archive to archive it? There is clear evidence that some do not want to be archived (the existence of opt out option). What data shows that most do?

Being archived is all advantages. Users don't generally go to the internet archive instead of the source, so it isn't really competing with you for users. People trust it as an independent party, so if you want to be able to claim that you said something a year ago, it allows you to point to it there and prove that you didn't just put it on your website yesterday and post-date it. If you blow up your website by accident, they've backed up the content for free. People like the idea of what they wrote being preserved for posterity.

The percentage of websites that actually opt out of being in the archive rounds to zero. Compare this to the much larger percentage of internet users who opt out of ads by installing ad blocking software, despite many websites whinging at you or refusing to display content if you do.

> For any given website, more likely than not they would want the Internet Archive to archive it.

I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website.

AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!

> I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website.

Let me rephrase. More websites would want to be archived than not. So that should be the default.

This is how defaults are meant to work. Unless the default is somehow harmful or dangerous, they should be the thing that the most people want, so as to reduce the amount of work involved in getting everyone to their preferred outcome. Having 1% of websites opt out is far less work for the websites than having 99% of websites opt in.

> AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!

You do realize how many websites there are. Why would you want to dump a collective million man hours of work on all of them to opt in, or the even worse consequences when they forget and then don't get archived like they would've wanted?

If a website that wants to be archived doesn't opt-in that is a failure of the website. If a website that doesn't want to be archived is archived that is a (possibly non criminal) trespass by the archivist.

Trespass? It's having a conversation with a public web server, not breaking and entering. It might fall under copyright law, but not trespass.

Is the Internet Archive archiving websites for the benefit of the internet users or the benefit of the website authors?

Yes.

Remember when that bank used the Internet Archive as a CDN by mistake? The Internet Archive functioned as a primitive form of version control, allowing them to get some client-side code they'd accidentally lost, but needed again.