peter: brewster kahle, you mentioned your parents. who were they and what did they do? brewster: i grew up outside of new york city. forarents, my father worked a fortune 500 company, commuting on the train every morning into manhattan. i tried that for a summer. gosh, that was a sacrifice my parents made for the kids that i wouldn't do for mine. living in the birds and spending -- birds and spending all your time commuting. i live in san francisco right in the city, but i really appreciate the good schooling that they afforded me. college withduate no debt, so i could pursue her -- pursue going working in a three-person little start of making children's toys out of college rather than the ibm offer i had also gotten. i wanted to do something else, so that was a support that my parents did in terms of letting and i reallyw, appreciate and i just wish there were more kids able to graduate college with no school debt. what a burden. what a burden that would be if you didn't find a job right away. fortunate,eel very but san francisco is home. -- i love theis dreamers. when

. >> brewster kahle, when you came up with this idea, what were you doing at the time? >> i was walking over the charles river a friend posed a question. he said, brewster, you're a technologist. yes. you're also a utopian idealist. yes. paint a portrait because of your technology. that turned out to be a very hard question. we're good about complaining about things, whether it's nuclear war or -- i could only come up with two ideas. one was trying to save people's privacy, even though people are going to throw it away. the other was build a library about everything. i thought the second one the library of everything was too obvious, but the privacy one was too difficult to try to make cost effective privacy devices by making chips in 1980. so i went to plan b. i've never turned back. there are a number of us that have an idea of what the worldwide web should be. we've made progress. it has participation by lots of people but we need better tools to make our way through it. it feels confusing, threatening to people. by people spreading disinformation and misinformation,

so brewster kahle, what you do for living? >> guest: i run the internet archives, internet library onto internet the gives way books, music, video webpages, software for free trying to build the internet into the library of alexandria for the digital age. >> host: that sounds like the internet, doesn't it? >> guest: the internet is getting there but let's take of the web. the average life of the webpage is only 100 days before it is changed or deleted. 100 days. we built our culture on this ever shifting sand so what the internet archives does is it take snapshots of the webpages on websites every two months. snapshot, snapchat comes snapshot. it's been doing this at 1986 and offers this as a service. it's used by hundreds of thousands a day. they find all these things disappear, either maliciously or sometimes just they drop off the net. >> host: how many websites are there today? >> guest: hundreds of millions and their coming and going all of the time. but we collect about 800 million pages every day. the total collection i

brewster kahle, what you do for living? >> i run the archives. internet library on the internet that catalogs books, trying to build the internet into the library of alexandria for the digital age. >> that sounds like the internet. doesn't it? >> guest: the internet is getting there but the published works is not fast enough. the average life of a webpage is only 100 days. before it is changed or deleted. one hundred days. we built our culture on this ever shifting hand soap with the internet archive it takes snapshots of the webpages on websites every two months. it takes a snapshot and it's been doing this since 1996 and offers it as a free service on archives .org and used by hundred of thousands of people a day to find all the things that been disappeared either maliciously or sometimes just drop off the net. >> how many websites are there today? >> guest: hundreds of millions and they are coming and going all of the time. we collect about 800 million pages every day. the total collection is about 800 billion urls. it's kind of huge and that

brewster kahle, what you do for living? >> i run the archives.ooks, trying to build the internet into the library of alexandria for the digital age. >> that sounds like the internet. doesn't it? >> guest: the internet is getting there but the published works is not fast enough. the average life of a webpage is only 100 days. before it is changed or deleted. one hundred days. we built our culture on this ever shifting hand soap with the internet archive it takes snapshots of the webpages on websites every two months. it takes a snapshot and it's been doing this since 1996 and offers it as a free service on archives .org and used by hundred of thousands of people a day to find all the things that been disappeared either maliciously or sometimes just

brewster kahle, what do you do for a living? >> i run internet archive, and internet library on the

on "the communicators," from the annual state of the net conference internet archive creator brewster kahle talks about documenting the internet. >> we collect about 800 million pages every day. the total collection is about 800 billion urls. so it's actually kind of huge. it turns out that to be on the part of what we do. we also archived television, abc, nbc, cbs, fox but also international television. if you go to tv.archive.org you can search to find clips what other state and put this in blog posts and the like. the idea is to make it so people can quote, compare and contrast, think critically about what's happened on television. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at the eastern on c-span2. >> c-span's has round-the-clock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it's all available on demand at c-span.org/coronavirus. watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials, track the spread throughout the u.s. and the world with interactive maps. watch on-demand any time, unfiltered at c-span.org/coronavirus.