This article characterizes the fear that the dominant commercial publishers felt when the World Wide Web was first launched. The authors portrays the late-1990s digital publishing landscape as chaotic and unstable, emphasizing issues like the transience of web content, broken links, and the difficulty of discovering and retrieving documents online. Davidson and Douglas frame the Internet as "in a state of impending chaos". What they seems to be really worried about is the reduction of profit as information becomes freely accessible. For example, they cite the example of Slate magazine’s decline in readership after introducing a subscription fee, highlighting that the biggest fear amongst the publishers was loss of their business model as information became freely accessible.
