Anybody has the right to criticize anyone; the question rather is, do they have a valid criticism. Your wording being so unclear I don't even know what you think about people banning IA from their site, but assuming you would criticize them, what would that criticism be? And would you also criticize someone for making their site private, or not making a site at all?
I think if the site is publicly accessible, it's basic Internet civility to allow IA to archive it, but especially so for a newspaper. It's a question of respect for your users and for journalism.
If they have fears about losing revenue - and although I find them silly - there are other ways of going about it, such as only allowing access to pages some weeks or months after they've been published.
Okay, I completely agree about newspapers, maybe other things as well. But you said people who ban IA from their site could be criticized, there are plenty of other comments along those lines, and I just don't see it. As advice, sure: if you post it on the internet, assume it will stick around forever, because that could happen. But still, there are personal public websites, if you know what I mean. They're not secret, they're not hidden, they are accessible to the public -- but they do not belong to the public, they are not like a public park or road. And sometimes, a website is more thinking aloud, or talking to oneself, than writing a book that then belongs to your "audience".
Civility is a good keyword, and while this may be a bit of a stretch, imagine sitting in public cafés and writing down what people say, and then criticizing people for lowering their voice and turning their back so you can't read their lips, even though you genuinely mean well, and just want to preserve daily public life for future historians. In general, this is what this attitude of "the internet" feeling entitled to whatever was ever posted anywhere feels to me. Maybe I just don't get it, but I really don't get it.
I think the question wether a private conversation should be recorded just because it's in public, just because you can, is kind of a no-brainer, but here are ones I don't have an answer to: Should an artist be allowed to make a performance and ask it to not be recorded? Should someone be able to hold a political speech and ask the same? For me the answers are kind yes, and no-ish... but what about political art? Are we allowed to try to influence people, and then try to erase the traces? Now that is tricky, and I may have ended up ranting myself into agreeing more with the IA "side" of the argument than I expected to. Because either something is personal, trivial in one way or another, or commercial and/or political. Personal things I think should be respected, but commercial and political things shouldn't be, they do belong to historians. Well, fuck.
[this is why I "blog" bit, actually -- because posting stuff online makes me think harder about them than I would otherwise, I don't even need an actual audience for that, just the possibility of one -- but that's also why I don't feel great about all of that floating around forever, it's all rather temporary in nature, a process.. and the person who wrote stuff a year ago does not exist anymore, so why should the name of this current person be attached to it?]
I think conflating a publicly accessible website with a private conversation - even if in a public setting - is specious. That said, I concede the point that some websites are meant to belong to the deep web, and while I wouldn't feel guilty about archiving it for personal use anyway, I wouldn't blame the author for banning archivers.
I'd say my general rule is closer to: if you allow search engines, you should allow IA.
W.r.t. your last question, historically the solution to that problem was simple and elegant: people used pen names to write what they didn't want to bind permanently to them. This way is also safer from unauthorized archiving - not everyone is as respectful of the author's wishes as IA.
I may not have a right to "pound" your site, but I certainly have a right to keep whatever I find on your public webserver, regardless of whether you decide to pull it down later.
Can we get an explanation of how not wanting to have your servers handling more requests than necessary compares to breaking into a library and setting it on fire?
I assumed the comparison was more directed to Asparagirl's "Yeah, I'm looking at you, Washington Post" example. Like this:
Perhaps individual private websites, such as pekk's, should have the right to say "No, you do NOT have the right to pound my site with requests and serve data that I decided to pull down."
However, in theory, the Washington Post's articles online are also (eventually) placed on microfiche. Saying there's no right to serve data that WP decided to pull down would in some sense require WP to "steal into libraries in the night and set fire to their microfiche collection".
The robots.txt will not only disallow your blog post, but if you acquired your domain from someone else, the entire previous site will also be removed. That is not something you should have a right to do, unless you also acquired full copyright to all of the previous site's revisions.
So sometimes an IA-friendly domain expires (e.g. accidentally or because its owner died), a squatter buys the domain, and the squatter points the domain at a junk-site landing server with a deny all robots.txt. The result is truly disastrous: IA removes access to the historic, IA-friendly site. Site acquirers who do this deliberately are pure evil.
If you don't want it on the internet, don't post it. Assuming anything can ever be made to disappear from the internet is naive, and if people become aware you are, it'll just get Streisanded and become even more widely posted.
There are two sides to this argument. I argue both. All the fucking time.
If you're in the business of providing public content that's well-known, to the public, then allowing it to be archived makes a lot of sense.
If you're providing user-generated content I'd argue that the case for allowing archival is extended even more so. Sites that violate this, and Quora comes specifically to mind, are violating what many, myself included, consider to be part of the social contract of the Web.
On the other hand, if you're an individual, and you are posting your own content and ramblings, and circumstances change for whatever reason: you've got a job, you've lost a job, you're married, you're divorced, you're getting divorced, your child is at war in a foreign country, a foreign country is at war with yours, or you're just sick of the crap you wrote when you were young and arrogant and now and old and arrogant you wants it gone: I'm pretty willing to grant you that right.
If you've committed some terrible crime against humanity, or just a human, and have been fairly tried and convicted of it, I'd probably not give you the right to remove large bits of that information.
And yes, there are vast fields, deserts, tundras, plains, steppes, ice-fields, and oceans of grey about all of this.
Barbra Streisand got Streisanded because she is Streisand.
Ahmed's Falafel Hut likely wouldn't suffer the same fate. His Q-score is somewhat lower, and there's only so much real estate in the public consciousness.
Things disappear from the internet, for good, all the time.
Also, if people become aware someone is naive they automatically are dicks to them? Regardless of wether that information is actually of interest to anyone, just because someone wants to take something down, they should not ever be able to?
Some people act and think like that that, yeah. But to accept this as the baseline of human behaviour is, well, not for me. This entitledness to watch the lives of others from the the dark may have been bred by reality TV or whatever; but it's more a personality flaw and an addiction, a useless misfiring of synapses become culture, than a cornerstone of an information age.
