Is it just me or is the internet beginning to die?

I am putting together a talk on FOSS Policy in India. I started DuckDuckGo-ing today morning for the relevant information and I came across a blogpost by the Open Source Observatory on the Indian Government and Open Source. Within that post, I came across the Open Source Software Country Intelligence Report on India published by the EU in 2021. I have been going through the links highlighted in that document, and the links I discovered within those links, and I swear that half of the pages are dead. Either the domains don't exist today (19 May 2024), the domains don't support HTTPS, or the pages don't exist leading to 404.

The internet is dying. And I don't know what to do about it.

Well, I know one thing that we can do. Especially in the case where internet links are being used in Policy Papers. Use the Wayback Machine and, if possible, financially support the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine enables you to "save" a website in it's current state and hyperlink the "saved" website. For example, instead of linking to http://nrcfoss.org.in/, which isn't alive anymore, hyperlink to the last time the webpage was alive (as far as the Wayback Machine is concerned) https://web.archive.org/web/20211218181139/http://nrcfoss.org.in/.

Side-note : I don't know how to react when the webpage for the National Resource Center for FOSS, the first item in the list for Major FOSS Initiatives under the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, is dead.

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