> we essentially have to compete against our own content
What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what?
If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.
Not sure what you're asking; we have to publish it or else it ain't exactly a website.
Beyond that, not only are there plenty of sites scraping us (the better ones use the API, the worst ones don't throttle and get throttled) but we periodically publish full archives, hosted by a neutral 3rd-party: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange - kinda hard to take back something that's been torrented.
What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what?
If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.