Internet History Preservation Initiative Calls for Urgent Data Stewardship

Network performance logs, routing data, and infrastructure records documenting the internet's evolution are disappearing at an alarming rate, jeopardizing future analysis of technological progress. The Internet History Initiative (IHI), spearheaded by networking veteran Jim Cowie, has launched a preservation effort to combat this data loss through structured archival protocols.

The Vanishing Record

Recent shutdowns of critical monitoring projects exemplify the threat. When Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory retired its PingER project after 30 years of global latency measurements, the dataset faced permanent deletion without preservation planning. Similarly, Renesys' infrastructure intelligence—acquired through multiple corporate buyouts—was largely lost during integration processes. "As time passes, information likes to disappear. If you do not invest, its default is to die," Cowie stated at the APRICOT 2026 conference.

Preservation Framework Requirements

The IHI mandates a multi-tiered preservation strategy:

1. Distributed Cold Storage: Implementation of the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) principle across partner institutions, storing redundant offline copies designed to survive for a century
2. Federation Layer: Centralized metadata indexing enabling discovery across decentralized archives
3. Research Access Tier: Warm-storage replicas of curated datasets for scholarly analysis

Existing models prove viability. The University of Oregon's RouteViews Project has maintained Border Gateway Protocol routing tables since 1997, while RIPE NCC has preserved decades of regional internet registry data. Both organizations have committed resources to IHI.

Compliance Timeline

Organizations holding historical network data should:

• Immediate (0-3 months): Inventory existing datasets including traceroutes, zone files, performance logs, and routing tables regardless of storage medium (including legacy formats like magnetic tape)
• Ongoing: Establish data donation protocols via the IHI mailing list for identified materials
• Long-term: Participate in federated preservation networks adopting IHI's archival standards

Regulatory Implications

While no current mandate requires indefinite internet history preservation, the initiative highlights growing accountability concerns:

• Historical internet data enables analysis of societal impacts like digital divide evolution
• Lost datasets undermine audit trails for infrastructure policy decisions
• Corporate data retention policies should consider historical value beyond compliance minimums

Cowie emphasizes urgency: "We've recovered PingER and RIPE datasets, but critical resources like transatlantic packet studies from the 2000s remain missing." The project seeks collaboration among technologists, archivists, and enterprises to prevent irreplaceable operational records from vanishing into what Cowie terms "the internet's memory hole."