That's not quite true. There's overall a big, distributed and decentraliszed effort to archive our electronic past, it's not just archive.org. For example, it's fun to look at old newsgroup discussions from 1994, and it's something I can find at Google's archive. And more importantly, it's available to everybody. And it's not the only place to find historical internet stuff.

I do agree though that archive.org is too valuable a resource to ever lose.

Google also isn't perfect. There was a post the other week about how there were no searchable images on Google older than ... I don't remember, 2005?

There has been plenty of content that has been wiped out for a lot of reasons : geocities went through a lot of changes pre-post yahoo buyout, all the university student pages, blogs/self host such has multimania/free/wanadoo (at least in France), forums such has ezboard. So much content disappeared and will disappear.

We just need to ask the NSA for their copy via a FOIA request.

I wonder if they have all the music that was lost on Myspace

They have an internal IceCast server with all of it.

I donate monthly to archive.org. I'm sure I've got more than my money's worth out of reserved websites that had something valuable to me.

it's a question of intent.

'the free world' loses internet content mostly because we are indifferent and don't value the humanities or social sciences as much as we used to.

china loses internet content because it is a one party state dictatorship that is purposely trying to eradicate the cultural artefacts of it's victims and opponents, by hiring masses of people whose career goals are the purposeful destruction of memory.

we do have examples similar to that, for example "free speech advocates" like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who abuse the legal system to silence critics. But those people are not literally running the government in a government that will never change hands.

I think this is a delusion. The threat that archive.org is under is that the government will shut it down.