Luke Hogg moderates a panel with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Vint Cerf of Google, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jon Stokes of Ars Technica on Oct. 27, 2025. (Foundation for American Innovation, Washington D.C.)

At Wayback to the Future: Celebrating the Open Web in Washington D.C., some of the internet’s founding figures gathered to reflect on what went wrong—and what might still be saved.

Hosted by the Foundation for American Innovation in the historic Riggs Library at Georgetown University, the panel brought together Vint Cerf (Google), Cindy Cohn (EFF), Jon Stokes (Ars Technica), and the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle.

Watch the discussion:

The conversation, moderated by Luke Hogg, focused on what the group called the “three Cs” behind the web’s decline: centralization, copyright, and competition. While the early web promised connection and creativity, today’s internet, they warned, is increasingly fragmented, paywalled, and dominated by a few powerful platforms.

Speaking beneath shelves of century-old books, Brewster Kahle posed a simple but urgent question: “Do we have these books on the internet anywhere?” His answer—“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free”—captured the tension at the heart of the conversation.

As libraries and users lose access to information locked behind corporate and legal barriers, Kahle called for a renewed commitment to an open, decentralized web: “Let’s have a game with many winners.”

The Internet Archive, now having preserved over one trillion webpages, continues to model that vision by building a more resilient, distributed digital library—one where knowledge remains accessible to all.

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