The Internet Forgets by Default: Link Rot, Digital Decay, and Why Open Licensing Is the Real Archive

We talk about the internet as if it never forgets. Once something is online, the saying goes, it is online forever — a permanent record, impossible to fully erase. It is a comforting idea, and it is almost exactly backwards. The default state of digital culture is not permanence. It is disappearance. Pages rot, platforms close, formats expire, and the vast majority of what we publish is quietly lost, often within a few short years of being made. Understanding why is the first step to understanding something this library is built around: that the most durable thing you can do with a digital work is not to lock it down, but to set it free.

How much the web actually forgets

The scale of the loss is easy to underestimate until you see it measured. A 2024 analysis by the Pew Research Center found that a quarter of all webpages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 were no longer accessible. For older material the decay is steeper still: 38 percent of pages that were live in 2013 had vanished a decade later. Even brand-new content is fragile — roughly 8 percent of pages created in 2023 were already gone by the end of that same year.

This is not only about whole websites going dark. Most of the time, an otherwise healthy site simply deletes or moves a page, and every link pointing to it breaks. Pew found that 23 percent of news webpages and 21 percent of government webpages contained at least one dead link, and that 54 percent of Wikipedia articles had at least one reference pointing to a page that no longer existed. A separate study by Harvard Law School and The New York Times, examining millions of links, found that a quarter of the links in Times articles were completely broken. Deep links — the URLs that point to a specific article or image rather than a homepage — are the most fragile of all, with research suggesting a median lifespan of well under two years.

Social platforms forget even faster. Nearly one in five posts on X disappears within months of being published. And entire libraries of culture can evaporate overnight: in 2019, MySpace acknowledged it had lost essentially everything uploaded before 2016 — more than a decade of music, photographs, and amateur creativity, gone in a single migration error. The web is not a stone tablet. It is sand.

Digital art has it worst

Of everything that lives online, born-digital art is among the most exposed. A painting can survive centuries of neglect in an attic; a digital artwork survives only as long as someone keeps copying it onto working hardware in a readable format. When the app it was made in is discontinued, when the proprietary file type loses support, when the hosting account lapses, the work does not degrade gracefully like a faded canvas. It returns a 404 and is simply gone.

The NFT boom offered a now-infamous illustration of the problem. Buyers were sold the idea of permanent, verifiable ownership, yet a great many tokens never contained the artwork at all — they pointed to an image stored somewhere off-chain, on ordinary web infrastructure that could, and frequently did, go offline. The blockchain entry survived; the picture it referred to rotted away. It was a costly reminder that the thing worth preserving was never the certificate. It was the copy.

The lesson extends far beyond digital art. Modern online culture increasingly depends on systems that users assume will be permanent simply because they are visible today. Yet websites disappear, platforms close, formats become obsolete, and entire digital communities can vanish within a few years. The challenge is not ownership but continuity. Whether the subject is an artwork, a historical archive, or a digital entertainment platform such as Realz Casino, long-term survival depends on active preservation rather than technological promises. The internet remembers less than people imagine, and every generation eventually discovers that digital permanence is not a default condition but an ongoing maintenance project.

Permanence is a legal question, not a technical one

Here is the part that gets overlooked. We tend to treat the survival of a digital work as a storage problem — a matter of bigger drives and better backups. But long before it is a technical problem, it is a legal one.

By default, copyright reserves all rights to the creator. That means the exclusive right to make copies belongs to one party, and everyone else is, strictly speaking, forbidden from doing the very thing that keeps a digital file alive: duplicating it, mirroring it, migrating it to a new format, depositing it in another archive. A work that is "all rights reserved" can only be lawfully preserved by its rights-holder — and rights-holders move on, shut down servers, go out of business, and die. When they do, and when no one knows who inherited the rights, the work becomes an orphan: still under copyright, legally untouchable, slowly decaying in a place no one is permitted to rescue it from. Some of the most significant losses in digital culture are not works that anyone wanted to destroy. They are works that everyone was afraid to copy.

This is the quiet failure mode of a closed system. A single custodian is a single point of failure. The more locked-down a work is, the more completely its survival depends on one actor never making a mistake — and over a long enough timeline, that actor always does.

Why the commons is the durable archive

Open licensing solves the part of the problem that backups cannot. A Creative Commons licence does not just grant permission to view a work; it grants a standing, irrevocable right to copy it, redistribute it, and in most cases adapt and re-host it. That single legal fact transforms a work's odds of survival, because it makes redundancy legal.

Archivists have a principle, sometimes summarised as "lots of copies keep stuff safe." The reason analog libraries are resilient is that the same book sits on thousands of shelves in thousands of buildings; no fire, flood, or bankruptcy can take all of them at once. Open licensing brings that same logic to digital culture. A CC-licensed image can be mirrored across countless servers, embedded in countless projects, forked, re-uploaded, and stored in institutional repositories — all without anyone needing to ask permission or track down a rights-holder who may no longer exist. When one host goes dark, the work persists everywhere else it was lawfully allowed to travel. Abundance, not scarcity, is what makes it permanent.

This is why a catalogue of openly licensed media is more than a convenience for people who need a free photo. It is a form of memory. Every work released under an open licence is a work that the entire world is now permitted to keep — to copy onto new drives, convert into future formats, and carry forward long after its creator's website has returned its final 404. The commons is not only generous. It is, measured over decades, the most reliable archive the digital world has.

The web forgets by default. Open licensing is how we decide to remember. In fifty years, the digital works most likely to still exist will not be the ones that were most fiercely owned. They will be the ones thatanyone, anywhere, was always allowed to copy.