July 2026

Lock the Web Open: Inside DWeb Camp 2026

/ / Events

Last week, in an ancient forest an hour outside Berlin, more than 500 builders, researchers, archivists, and artists gathered to ask the same question in a hundred different ways: how do we build a web that cannot be switched off, sold, or shut down. Internet Archive Europe helped bring it there.

Ten Years On, First Time in Europe

For the first time in its ten-year history, DWeb Camp left the redwoods of Northern California. This year it landed at Alte Hölle, a former Stasi recreation site now home to a collectivist community, set on 100,000 square metres of forest and meadow in Brandenburg. The event is co-hosted this year by the Internet Archive, the Department of Decentralization, and IAE, which is why our co-founder Julien Masanès and our Programme Manager Beatrice Murch spent the week there rather than reading about it afterwards.

The move mattered. While the first Dweb Summit was held in 2016, DWeb Camp began in 2019 at an abandoned mushroom farm south of San Francisco, when Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle brought together the creative spirit of Burning Man and the hacktivist energy of Chaos Communication Camp. A decade later, the same spirit crossed an ocean to gather closer to the policymakers, researchers, and institutions IAE works with every day.

None of this happens without someone tending it in between camps. Wendy Hanamura has been DWeb’s connective tissue since 2016, linking the builders, funders, and policymakers scattered across the movement and keeping the conversation about shared values, markets, and technical standards moving forward year round. Her pitch for the movement has always been straightforward: a decentralised web should let many different projects succeed side by side, rather than funnelling everyone toward a single dominant platform, which is closer to what the web was meant to be before it consolidated. It shows in how DWeb Camp runs. Attendees writing about the Berlin edition were quick to credit her and the wider DWeb team with pulling off the move to Europe.

Nine Tracks, One Direction

This year’s theme, Root Systems, was more than a nice metaphor. Mycelium networks don’t have a centre and don’t ask permission. They share resources peer to peer, and they survive when any single tree falls. That is the model DWeb Camp is building toward: protocols instead of platforms, infrastructure that can’t be pulled up by a single actor, however powerful.

Over five days, programming ran across nine content tracks: Anti-Authoritarian Stack, Cultivating Tech for Food Sovereignty, Decentralized Design, Decentralized Hardware and Local Community Networks, Open Social Web, Peer-to-Peer and Local-First, Public AI, Solidarity Tech, and Sustaining Infrastructure, spread across more than a dozen stages, tents, and workshop spaces. The full programme ran from morning yoga to midnight campfires, with sessions on mesh networking and cooperative governance sitting alongside a children’s puppet parade and a camp talent show.

Lock the Web Open

Brewster Kahle opened the camp with a talk that set the tone for the five days that followed, closing with a line that stuck with everyone who heard it: “Let’s build a decentralized web and lock the web open.” It is a simple instruction with a hard edge. Open access to knowledge is not a default state the web slides into. It has to be built, defended, and locked in place before someone else locks it shut.

One of the week’s most talked-about moments had nothing to do with slides. Attendee Andre Kudra described sitting down with Bruce Baumgart, who built the Internet Archive’s original “Petabyte Box,” for a long conversation about consciousness and whether machines could ever possess it. For Kudra, exchanges like that explained why the camp format works better than a normal conference: once people are sharing meals and tents for days on end, the small talk runs out fast and the real conversations start.

Those conversations quickly transformed into constructive brainstormings on Kahle’s own project OnionPress. The project pairs a familiar WordPress dashboard with a permanent Tor address and automatic backup through the Wayback Machine, and it picked up real interest at camp, with people asking how to get involved almost as often as they asked how it worked. It is still early and rough around the edges, but it works, and it says something about the mood at Alte Hölle that a tool built around exactly this instruction found such an eager audience. 

No Egos, Just Roots

Julien came back from Alte Hölle struck by something harder to put into a session title: the atmosphere. Wherever he went and whoever he spoke with, the same thing surfaced. People were friendly, generous with their time, and entirely focused on solving real problems for the public good. No egos, no turf wars, no cliques. Just a few hundred people looking in the same direction and working out how to get there together.

That showed up in the smaller sessions too. Bart Delrue, who teaches electronics and ICT at Odisee, ran an accessibility clinic that skipped the theory in favour of hands-on triage of real projects people had brought with them, and gave a talk on RSS as, in his words, the original simple and resilient root system. Elsewhere, the Platoniq Foundation led an immersive role-play on who gets to govern and fund democratic technology, and joined a Sustaining Infrastructure panel with the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Matthias Kirschner and Metagov’s Liz Barry on what keeps community-run infrastructure alive once the initial excitement fades. None of it was solemn. One evening session, built around a stash of glow-in-the-dark paint, flipcharts, and a Fediverse cape, filled the Social Web tent with campers making button badges and dancing to a Lily Allen track.

Coalitions around decentralisation and digital rights often fracture along exactly the lines DWeb Camp avoided: competing standards, competing funding streams, competing claims to who got there first. This one built something more durable than any single protocol: a working culture that treats collaboration as the default.

AI as Root, Not Threat

Sessions in the camp’s Public AI track treated artificial intelligence as a tool that could accelerate a more decentralised, public-interest web: language models built for communities with little existing infrastructure, public AI projects designed in the open, conservation and agricultural tools grounded in shared, non-proprietary data. A demonstration of the BetterEdge Sovereignty Anchor, a confidential-computing approach to running servers outside traditional data centres, drew praise from both Kahle and Baumgart. Built this way, AI spreads capability outward instead of pulling it into fewer hands, one more root in the system rather than another centralising force.

Why This Is IAE’s Work Too

Everything Root Systems stands for sits close to what Internet Archive Europe pushes for in Brussels and Amsterdam: memory institutions that can collect, preserve, and provide access on their own terms, rather than terms set by whichever platform happens to hold the data this decade. A decentralised web and a legally protected right to digital memory are two routes to the same destination. We therefore encourage you to sign the Our Future Memory Statement that aims at pushing decision makers in the right direction. 

As regards DWeb, it runs on volunteers and a community that keeps showing up year after year.  Moving forward, nodes should continue to spread and we are looking to start a DWeb node in Amsterdam, so please get in touch at office@internetarchive.eu. More generally, if Root Systems is a movement you want to help grow, please check out the DWeb Principles and use the DWeb contact form.

Photo credit: Anton Tal

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Mozilla AI at Internet Archive Europe: Owning Your AI Stack

/ / Public AI, Public Domain

On 25 June, Internet Archive Europe (IAE) hosted Davide Eynard and Thomas (toto) Bille from Mozilla AI at our Amsterdam space. The afternoon covered a question that sits close to the heart of what we do: when you depend on infrastructure you don’t control, what do you actually own?

Ada, Zangemann, and the case for tinkering

Davide opened with a children’s book: Ada & Zangemann. Ada is a girl who lives in a dumpster, salvages broken hardware, and builds things entirely her own. Zangemann builds beautiful, polished technology that no one else can modify or adapt. The clash between them drives the story, but Davide used it as a frame for something more immediate: most people’s relationship with AI today looks a lot more like Zangemann’s world than Ada’s. You use what you’re given, on the terms it’s offered, for as long as the provider decides to keep it available.

This has nothing to do with technology: it’s a power relationship. And that logic applies to memory institutions every bit as much as to individual developers.

The trade-offs are concrete

To make the point, Davide rebuilt a small tool he’d originally written by hand more than twenty years ago: a script to extract train timetables from a website too clunky to use directly. He produced the rebuilt version with an AI coding assistant, and it worked. But the result lived on someone else’s platform, not his own machine. And unlike the original, which taught him Perl and regular expressions he used for years afterward, this one taught him nothing. Convenience and ownership turned out not to be the same thing.

Search as activity, not action

One of the sharpest distinctions in Davide’s talk was between search as an action and search as an activity. When you type a question into a box and accept the answer, that’s an action. When you use an agent to follow a thread, evaluate what it finds, redirect it when it goes wrong, and build toward a conclusion over time, that’s an activity. The difference matters because the second approach keeps you in the loop. You catch mistakes. You steer.

The clearest example: Davide used an agent to track down the original source of a widely cited Bill Gates quote. The agent searched, hit dead links, found partial copies, and eventually installed a subtitle extraction tool autonomously, downloaded a YouTube video, and identified the exact moment Gates said the thing. Along the way, it returned to the Wayback Machine around a dozen times, working through broken URLs until it found a usable copy.

It was a quiet illustration of something IAE says often: preserved web history is not a nostalgia project. It is working infrastructure. AI systems now depend on it to check what is actually true.

A second demo used a locally run open source model to search the Rijksmuseum’s digital collection for images connected to alchemy and the pursuit of knowledge, producing usable results entirely on Davide’s own hardware. No cloud service, no rented compute, no data leaving the machine.

Otari: making ownership practical

Thomas (toto) Bille followed with a look at the infrastructure side of the problem. Mozilla AI has built Otari as an open-source LLM gateway: a single control plane for all your interactions with language models, whether you run a local model on your own server or route through a commercial API.

The features that generated the most discussion were practical ones. Budget controls granular enough to cap spending per user, per model, or per team. Guardrails that strip personal or sensitive data before it reaches any external provider. A federated router in development that will recommend which model to use based on real usage patterns across the community, with options to prioritise cost, quality, or energy use. Otari is fully self-hostable: if you don’t want your data passing through Mozilla AI’s servers, you don’t have to. The code is on GitHub.

The honest question

Someone in the room asked how Mozilla AI intends to stay financially viable if the tools are free and open source. Toto’s answer was direct: revenue from the hosted version, income from enterprise integration work, and a long-term bet on the community. It’s the same tension that runs through almost every public-interest digital project, including IAE’s own. There’s no clean resolution, but naming it honestly matters.

Why this conversation belongs here

The afternoon drew developers, researchers, and people from across the cultural heritage sector. The discussion after the talks ran for close to an hour.

What connected the room wasn’t a shared technical interest in language models. It was a shared unease about dependency. Memory institutions know what it looks like when access to knowledge sits on infrastructure you don’t own and can’t influence. IAE has spent years arguing that the rights archives have always held offline must be protected online too. The same holds for one layer up, to the AI systems now sitting on top of those archives.

Explore Mozilla AI’s open-source tools, including AnyAgent, AnyLLM, LlamaFile, and Otari, at mozilla.ai and github.com/mozilla-ai.

You can watch a replay of the presentation and conversation on Archive.org and see the slides online.

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Rights on Paper Are Not Enough: Our Input to the EU Copyright Review

/ / Digital Rights for Libraries

A copyright exception you cannot use is not really an exception.

That idea runs through the submission Internet Archive Europe (IAE) submitted to the European Commission this month. On 25 June, we responded to the Commission’s Call for Evidence on copyright, the review that will shape what users, libraries, archives and museums across Europe can do with digital materials for years to come.

The Commission asked for input on four areas. We answered each one, and we added a point the consultation left out: the basic rights memory institutions need to do their work online. Here is what we told them.

Protect the preservation work that the law already allows

European law already lets libraries, archives and research organisations mine text and data, including for training AI models, when the purpose is preservation or research. Lawmakers made a deliberate choice to protect that public-interest work without giving rightsholders a veto over it.

That protection is being quietly undone. Large rightsholders now apply blanket opt-outs, built for commercial AI, across the board. They draw no line between a company training a product and an archive preserving the record, and so they block the very preservation work the law set out to protect.

We asked the Commission to confirm what the Directive already implies: an opt-out designed for commercial use cannot override the preservation and research rights of cultural heritage institutions.

Tackle piracy without breaking the open web

Piracy of live events is a real problem. But the answer some governments have reached for does more harm than the problem it sets out to solve.

We pointed to two examples. Italy’s Piracy Shield blocks content so bluntly that the Commission itself wrote to Rome in 2025, finding the system out of step with fundamental rights. In Spain, courts have ordered VPN providers to block access in proceedings where those providers had no chance to speak, and ordinary websites get caught in the net.

These are enforcement tools built for commercial pirates, used without proper judicial oversight, and the damage falls on people and services that did nothing wrong. We asked the Commission to measure that damage before legislating further, and to rule out using live-event blocking against general, non-commercial websites.

One research exception, not twenty-seven

Right now, the EU’s research exception is optional. Member States have implemented it differently, leaving researchers facing 27 distinct legal environments and real barriers to working across borders. Publicly funded research often ends up locked behind the very paywalls the public already paid to overcome.

We backed a single, mandatory research exception across the EU, and a right for researchers to make publicly funded work openly available the moment it is published, with no embargo. Contracts and technical locks should not be allowed to override either.

The four rights every memory institution needs

The consultation’s four questions miss something larger. The Our Future Memory statement, which more than seventy organisations have now signed, including the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Council on Archives (ICA), sets out four rights that libraries, archives, and museums need in the digital world: to collect, to preserve, to provide access, and to cooperate across borders. Today’s law falls short on all four.

Collect. No EU rule requires the deposit of born-digital and web-published material. Journalism, government records, and culture that exists only online are slipping out of the published record entirely. We asked for a common baseline for the legal deposit of digital materials.

Preserve. Current law allows institutions to copy works for preservation only if those works are already in their permanent collection. Most of the open web and most licensed content fall outside it. We called this the 21st-century black hole: material that exists today and will be gone tomorrow because no one holds the legal right to save it.

Provide access. Two old rules hold this back. One governs works that are no longer commercially available, where licensing can take two to four years, if it happens at all, leaving a century of out-of-print culture in limbo. The other still ties library access to physical terminals on the premises, with no route to secure remote access for readers who cannot travel. Both need fixing.

Cooperate. Libraries can lend to each other across borders on paper, but not in digital form. A researcher who cannot travel has no legal way to obtain a digital copy. We asked for a clear cross-border exception for the supply of digital documents between research and library institutions.

The gap we want closed

Across every one of these areas, the same pattern shows up. Exceptions exist in the law, but technical locks, one-sided contracts, and the fear of getting it wrong stop institutions from using them. Faced with legal risk, librarians and archivists hold back, and rights that look solid on paper quietly disappear.

The Commission has a real chance to close the gap between what the law says memory institutions can do and what they can actually do, day to day. We will continue to make that case as the review moves forward.

Read our full submission here and add your organisation’s voice to Our Future Memory at ourfuturememory.org.

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