Earlier this year, we wrote about Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Internet is Rotting,” an essay about how important historical records are disappearing from the web at an alarming rate. Zittrain indirectly made the case that it would be a mistake for policymakers to rely on the web as the sole publication point for statutory notice, since such notice is in part designed to serve as the official and unassailably accurate first draft of history.

More evidence that the internet annihilates memory comes to us from CNN Business, which published a story last month about how the demise of Adobe Flash wiped out “some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage” as well as “other major events from the early days of online journalism.”

Adobe made the decision to kill its multimedia plug-in in 2017 and finally buried Flash for good at the end of 2020. “(W)hat was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that ‘Adobe Flash player is no longer supported.’”

The memory-holing of historical records is endemic to the web, a largely commercial platform that is mostly concerned with profit, not history. It happens every time an important internet company goes out of business or a particular platform or essential piece of internet software is abandoned for something better.

Adobe Flash was overtaken by HTML5. When HTML5 becomes something else, a new round of history destruction will follow.

The internet doesn’t care about history and isn’t going to protect it. That responsibility largely falls to public officials who can play a significant role in deciding which history gets preserved. Ensuring that official notice is published in print and on the internet — think of the engineering concept of redundancy — is one small way policymakers can make a stand for the preservation of historical records.