At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.
The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.
To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.
Since the web is totally worldwide, we need a set of behavioural rules, laws they are commonly called, that are accepted worldwide. There is a big difference as to how things are treated in the U.S. and Europe and Asia.