INTERNET STARTING TO FORGET ITSELF

Internet content is at risk from changes in coding that threaten to make old files unreadable, and from broken hyperlinks to sites that are not maintained, according to Vint Cerf, the man sometimes called the "Father of the Internet" for his work on TCP/IP, the language a computer uses to access the internet.

Speaking at a presentation organised by the University of New South Wales' engineering faculty and Google in Sydney on Wednesday (27th June), Cerf likened the phenomenon to memory loss in a human:

"We have a big problem. I call it the digital dark age. We don’t curate our digital content with much care and until we realise that, we can’t get any of it. It’s gone, we can’t read any of the bits anymore."

Cerf believes that everything on the internet today -- from photos and documents to records and social media -- could cease to be functional in as little as a decade, as old formats and standards are superseded.

Cerf (left)

Cerf called for a new digital preservation regime that would "respect" old code and back up old content.

“I’m a big fan of a project to create a regime in which we can assure ourselves the digital content that has meaning to you and to me and to others is still readable...The regime that should be in place [is] one in which old software is preserved, hardware can be emulated in the files so we can run old operating systems and old software so we can actually do something with the digital objects that have been captured and stored...Think of all the papers we read now, especially academic papers that have url references. Think about what happens 10, 20, 50 years from now when those don’t resolve anymore because the domain names were abandoned or someone forgot to pay the rent.”

Cerf also addressed the issue of where such a vast quantity of data could be stored.

“If all the resolution process needs to be maintained for a long period of time, someone has to store the data somewhere,” Cerf said. “It still has to be retrievable and it still has to be interpretable and some of the other things.”

Cerf praised the efforts of Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive over the last 20 years.

Because he works for Google, Cerf failed to mention several other waves of "internet amnesia" specifically created by his corporate masters, such as shadow banning, rigged search results, and deplatforming.

Frankly, if the internet were a person it would already have serious mental issues.