Choosing any one "the right entity" is the wrong strategy for truly robust preservation.
Redundancy in a variety of organizations & technical regimes best ensures durability against all risks. So the IA's efforts here should be encouraged, and those of every other project able to take on similar duties.
And if vaguely implying that the IA is inadequate, please at least hint at potential alternatives who are or could be doing the necessary work instead. Note that anyone concerned about IA's longevity can and should leverage IA's groundwork – such as by mirroring its collections elsewhere, as is fairly straightforward either via explicit coordination or even dark/uncoordinated scraping.
Your point about multiple points of failure is well made, but one of the problems with the constant focus on the admirable efforts of the Internet Archive here and elsewhere is precisely that the many other archiving and digital preservation efforts go by relatively unheralded and underfunded.
Having said that, the spotlight on the IA does give opportunity to raise the profile of web archiving and digital preservation generally; we just need to be careful not to invest everything in any one initiative - as the parent comment fairly points out.
> one of the problems with the constant focus on the admirable efforts of the Internet Archive here and elsewhere is precisely that the many other archiving and digital preservation efforts go by relatively unheralded and underfunded.
Any chance you could point me to some other initiatives? I'm always interested in finding more repositories of information.
Yeah archives can be affected by multiple threats. Fire, natural catastrophies, etc. are one. Those can be fixed within the organization, by creating redundant copies in different places. There are organizational threats as well, affecting the structure running the archive. It's the guardians of the archive not being able or willing to preserve parts or all of it. The lawsuit is such an organizational threat.
Redundancy in a variety of organizations & technical regimes best ensures durability against all risks. So the IA's efforts here should be encouraged, and those of every other project able to take on similar duties.
And if vaguely implying that the IA is inadequate, please at least hint at potential alternatives who are or could be doing the necessary work instead. Note that anyone concerned about IA's longevity can and should leverage IA's groundwork – such as by mirroring its collections elsewhere, as is fairly straightforward either via explicit coordination or even dark/uncoordinated scraping.