This is a good thing to do, but for once, I'm not sure the Internet Archive is the right entity to do it. I don't think the IA can ensure permanent access to anything at all right now since it's facing an existential threat as a result of its "lend copies of books that belong to other institutions" stunt.
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.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiat...
International Internet Preservation Consortium is an active body linking many of them.
There are various resources giving information on tools etc, eg.
https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving
https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...