The Unanchored Web
The web was built on the assumption that a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a permanent address. In practice, it is merely a rent agreement. When a domain expires, a server is reorganized, or a company pivots, the address remains but the house disappears.
Link Rot is not a bug; it is a structural feature of a decentralized system with no central librarian. It means that the web is undergoing constant, silent entropy. A link created today has a "half-life" of approximately two years before it begins to decay.
Types of Decay
Archaeobytologists identify two distinct forms of rot:
1. The Hard 404 (Link Rot)
The link leads nowhere. The server returns a "404 Not Found" error. The path is broken, and the user hits a dead end. This is visible and obvious decay.
2. The Soft 404 (Reference Rot)
The link still works, but the content has changed. A link to a 2015 news article might now redirect to the homepage, or worse, to a different article entirely (a phenomenon known as "Content Drift"). This is insidious because the citation looks valid but provides false evidence.
Field Notes
The Legal Crisis: A 2014 Harvard Law Review study found that 50% of the URLs cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the original information. This means the foundational evidence for the highest laws in the land is slowly evaporating. Digital justice is being built on quicksand.
The "Cool URI" Myth: In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee famously wrote "Cool URIs Don't Change," arguing that broken links were a failure of management, not technology. Thirty years later, history has proven that human institutions are rarely stable enough to maintain "cool" URIs for decades.
Ephemera
The Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" is currently the only systematic defense against Link Rot. By integrating with Wikipedia and other platforms, it attempts to "heal" rot by replacing dead links with archived snapshots. However, this relies on the snapshot having been taken before the rot set in—a race against time.