I have to admit that I haven't read into the depths of this article, or followed any of the links or suggestions that appear within it, but it caught my eye for a number of reasons.

The first was merely the coincidence factor, as I had spent some time mulling over the changes that have taken place on the internet, particularly in recent years, and the second arose because Robber Barons like Rupert Murdoch want to put content behind paywalls. Back at the start, because people had already produced their content for print or other reasons, transferring it to the web was a minimalist exercise, as the bulk of the cost had already been expended and paid for. It can't be any coincidence that the "recession" was engineered recently, in order to provide the motivation for finding " new"sources of revenue.

In the old days, before big business and commercial interests took over the internet, it was full of people adding content with no need or even desire to raise revenue from it. If they did, it was done merely by advertising or pointing visitors to the existing revenue raising activities.

However, returning to the original first point, I had been wondering where all the original and interesting web sites had gone, as these are not generally evident when carrying out normal web searches using the big search engines, and in order to find those old sites, it's necessary to either drill down to far end of the results from the big search engines, or use an smaller and more specialised alternative. Even so, very few of those site surface, and you have to know the old url to find those old sites.

It seem that these are now part of the "dark web", a remarkable 99.97% of the internet which the big search engines do not return results from. According to the following article, and providing it does not have a misprint, the beg searchers are only searching and returning results from 0.03% of the total web pages available (but that figure is now eight years old)...

The dark side of the internet | Technology | The Guardian

It seems the Dark Internet is not popular in Australia, and the government there is well underway with its own plans to censor internet access in that country:

Australian government plans internet censorship - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

It seems our cousins are merely following the UK and European lead though:

Quoted Text

It is not, however, radically different from plans already in place elsewhere. Most of the UK's internet service providers already filter their content using an industry-run blacklist maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation. ISPs are not forced to comply, but they will be if European Union proposals announced this summer are enacted

This is bad news, since it is promoted on the basis of child pornography etc, but there is nothing to stop governments and other "authorities" form placing whatever they do not want others to see on the "Blacklist", or of the inevitable mistakes and misunderstandings that will occur.

I'm always reminded of Mary Whitehouse, who may have gained fame as the television cleanup campaigner, but spent her life staring at and watching all the indecent programmes and pornography that was apparently unfit for us to view  and be corrupted by.

What was her mind like by the time she died, after watching all that stuff on our behalf?

I am fascinated by this thread. I recall back in the early 90's an amzing amount of fun was to be had surfing the net and you really could source information on anything good and bad. I liked it, I enjoyed the anarchic flow of information particulalry from weird and wonderfully very clever people who had a lot of really interesting info to share to the world. Recently I wanted to show a friend the origonal anarchists cookbook to demonstrate that it really did exisit but I couldn't find it and I thought all these sites had really closed down but you have proved to me otherwise and the whole concept of filtering information access on my behalf suddenly becomes all the more alarming and sinister when you exlore the consequences of that. What web have we now?