OK, a serious comment . .

As far as I am aware there is no move away from the web by the commercial sector, although different companies policies on how much to make public do vary widely, and an increasing number use "private login" areas for an increasing amount of their information.

Also, as the web has become more commercial there has been a growing tendency to see it as a source of income; "why publish that for free when we can make money from it" - essentially the IT industry (formerly the "computer geeks") has become more "commercially aware" - the one trail which Bill Gates can accurately claim to have blazed.

"Guest"'s stuff about a high-speed secret Net is a good example of the non-attributed garbage which clogs the web. (I guess he's talking about IPv6 services which are certainly not secret . . )

The probem is that it's so much easier to obtain huge volumes of information now that it's difficult to refine the results. And the "alternative" can so easily be drowned by the "mainstream". Simply using the web to access well-accredited, familiar (and usually "establishment") sources does rather defeat the idea of an "open to all" information system, but evaluating the accuracy of anything else can be . . tricky!

I'm certain many Research Papers have been written on all of this, and that many, many, many more will be in the future.

G.