The World Wide Web Is Turning 30. It’s Also Dying, One Link at a Time.
On April 30, 1993, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee released the source code for the World Wide Web into the public domain. Thanks to CERN, the intergovernmental scientific organization based in Switzerland, we can still see what the first website looked like, all of its hyperlinks fully functional.
But other links, and sites, aren’t as well preserved. Thirty years on, “link rot” — the tendency of hyperlinks to stop leading where they were intended to go— is “the entropy of the web,” as web developer Jeremy Keith has put it. It’s shockingly pervasive: In 2013, researcher Jonathan Zittrain estimated that almost half of the links in U.S. Supreme Court decisions are dead. A 2021 study found that a quarter of the links in New York Times articles, going back to 1996, point to “completely inaccessible pages.”
At least SCOTUS and the Times have paper backups. All-digital resources are less fortunate. I’m all too aware that my own blog, which I’ve published since 2006, is pocked with links that lead to “404 not found” pages. I do my best to keep the links alive, but it’s a Sisyphean task.
There are many reasons for link rot: A domain may have expired. A website may have been restructured. Content may be dynamic. Pages may have been deleted.
