Using the Internet Archive for Due Diligence
This country has become a place where one can believe or deny anything and find a significant number of people who share the position. A curiously large number of people appear to earn a living in these pursuits, and intellectuals, technologists and Big Thinkers flood media with discussions of the immense power of technology to warp reality and the risks technologies pose to the concept of shared truth in society.
The prognosticators might be right and I’m not blind to the ways these concerns are valid in terms of their potential impacts on politics and social cohesion, but I take some comfort in the idea that while there is a motive for many to create and stoke worry about a warped reality, most of us need to make or do something of value and we rely on ways of accurately sharing information about what we do to support that goal.
Preserving the Past with the Internet Archive
In our work at North Point, The Internet Archive (web.archive.org) is one of the best tools for examining those representations, establishing important connections and triangulating to resolve open questions about people and organizations using information of their own creation over time. It isn’t perfect or fool proof, but it is shockingly comprehensive and once we developed an understanding of its logic and navigational quirks it became an important part of achieving our mission of accurately representing history.
For the uninitiated, the Internet Archive is, as the name suggests, an archived internet. Among its other functions (it partners with organizations to act as a repository for digital information etc.) its Wayback Machine is basically a horizontal version of the web – a way to access the internet across time. Using a robotic crawler, it has been cataloging web content since the 1990’s. It allows our team to understand how a company or person represented its experience at a specific moment in time, how it presented its offerings, where it was located or through which legal entity it was operating at a moment of interest to us or our clients.
We have used it to unearth details that led to discovering litigation for which we would not have known to look, or businesses we did not know existed or details that opened avenues of inquiry that would have otherwise been hidden from view.
Archives Provide an Important Public Service
At North Point we are on a mission to conduct thorough research and tell accurate stories as completely as we can in a short period of time. The most valuable tools for our work unearth threads and provide clues about where we can look to definitively resolve open questions. Depending on the day or engagement, the Archive does a bit of both.
The Internet Archive is free to use, supported by donations and funding from governmental and other grants. It is the creation of prominent digital librarian (definitely the only one I could name) Brewster Kahle, who set out to record the internet because “for thousands of years, libraries and archives have provided this important public service. I started the Internet Archive because I strongly believed that this work needed to continue in digital form and into the digital age”.
The Future of the Internet Archive and our Library System
The archive has detractors; some who cite copyright concerns (a lengthy litigation related to those concerns was resolved in 2025) and others, including an aspiring Mars resident who slashed federal funding for the archive because he seemed to view efforts to accurately remember history as a partisan trap. But for regular people, unconcerned with breaking or saving society, who need to go to work and want to make sure they understand the reality of a given situation or would like history to accurately reflect them or their organization, it is as reliable and helpful a tool as exists. For its supposed faults and clunky navigation (it has some nuances that make its efficient use a real skill) it is an incredible source reliable recent history.
Since I have no political aspirations and no future in the conspiracy influencer economy, until someone makes something better, I and almost everyone I know will be using the internet to do our jobs, build companies, brands, reputations etc. and as long as that is the case, the Archive will have an important role to play in making sure we know who we were.
About the Author
Isaac Garcia-Dale founded North Point Associates in 2018 in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Over the last 7+ years, Isaac has built North Point to be a leader in research for serious, high-stakes decisions for a wide range of clients across private equity, strategic communications and law. Today, Isaac leads the company and oversees strategy, business development and refining our research process.
Isaac holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics-Finance from Bentley College and a Doctor of Law (J.D.) from Suffolk University.
To learn more and support the Internet Archive, please visit https://archive.org/.
