Why is the Internet Archive moving to Canada?

The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that helps catalog billions of Web pages for historical record, has begun collecting donations to build a copy of the collection in Canada, as the future of privacy and the Internet under President-elect Trump presents several unknowns.

While on the campaign trail, he stated that one way to fight ISIS is by “closing that Internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people.”

In a blog post, founder Brewster Kahle describes the organization's mission of “fighting to protect our readers’ privacy in the digital world” and “keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible.”

Currently the digital library hosts more than 279 billion Web pages.