Why should tax dollars be used for this?

> Why should tax dollars be used for this?

Because:

> We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance

The Statue of Liberty is an historical landmark.

Random Geocities pages are not.

Individual Geocities pages are not valuable landmarks, but Geocities as a whole - the aesthetic, the community, the history - is definitely something to preserve. And the cost of saving all of Geocities is a tiny fraction of any physical monument.

What about the right to be forgotten? I certainly wouldn't want some random geocities page I made as a pre-teen, quite possibly with personal information on it, preserved and accessible for all eternity. Times were oh so much more innocent back then, putting mailing addresses and phone numbers on personal sites wasn't uncommon.

Jumping from one argument to another doesn't make for a good discussion. Either defend your initial argument, or start a different argument on the same level as the first.

That has nothing to do with it. The right to be forgotten is not mutually exclusive with public funding for the preservation of culturally valuable records. No one is saying you couldn't ask to have a specific datum removed, edited, or obscured to the public to protect your personal information.

Because government, and the tax dollars that support it, are how we, as a society, take collective action?

Why is an archive of DPTeview something that is more important than covering basic things like health care (especially mental) that we do terribly at?

Why can’t those who care about or undertake the effort? Thousands of nonprofit private historical societies exist.

interesting questions, but since there's no mutual exclusivity in real life, they aren't relevant to the real question, whether taxpayers believe there is value there

after all, congress could decide to cover this AND healthcare, they just don't want to do either

have you heard of the idea of a museum by chance?

Yes, they involve this thing called curation, not bulk archiving.

Bulk archival is cheaper than hiring a curator. It uses up less of the taxpayer's money.

What's been preserved of the earlier web will always be a little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.

Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.

I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.

Laws are only as good as people's willingness to defend them. They are not real. Resource mobilization is a much better long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.