The Web as publishing utopia

Peter Baldwin's suggestions for replacing the "publishing" system with some type of "vetting" system rely heavily on 'net accessibility.  "Cutting the tie between publication and evaluation," he argues, "means that—thanks to the web’s practically limitless availability—every work, having passed through the Review Institute, can go straight to its intended audience, and anyone else in the world who is interested."  But the web isn't "practically limitless" in its availability, as a quick look at these stats from 2012 suggests.   Nor is material from the web necessarily unfiltered on its way to the end user, thanks to various forms of control ranging from net-nannying to government censorship.  Indeed, I can imagine some users (including non-academics in vulnerable situations) becoming anxious about having their visits to particular texts tracked.  (Surely we all know by now that our voyages across the 'net have a bad habit of leaving awkward footprints?)  And someone's research on, say, sexuality could easily fall afoul of campuswide (or statewide) regulations about what you can and can't access on an office machine.  (This is not, in fact, a hypothetical situation.  Think about the likely result of trying to use a serious study of pornography or erotica that includes images.)   One doesn't need a proverbial tinfoil hat to suggest that the internet poses its own set of potentially serious limitations to the dissemination of scholarship.