Who owns the Web ...
The other part of the question, who owns the websites, is similarly answered. Each website is owned and financed by an organisation or person. They alone have the rights to place their own information on the website.
So Governments will want to have websites to put up information for their citizens to be able to access. Commercial organisations will want to put up websites with information about their products to encourage sales. Other information providers will similarly create sites to distribute knowledge. Then there are millions of websites which are paid for and run by individuals who want to present information about their hobbies, favourite pop stars, family history etc.
So there is no one person or body responsible for what exists on the web. It is really quite difficult then to enforce laws proscribing offensive matter because there is no overall control and the offensive site can be situated anywhere in the World.
Tim Berners-Lee was the originator of the web and he saw it as a cooperative space for the sharing of information among researchers. He was working at CERN. It still can perform that purpose but the main driving force is now by commercial interests. On-line shopping is a very valuable sector nowadays and in the future there will be more and more commercial uses.
However you should be aware of the very different forces influencing what is seen in the search results. There are individuals, organisations and companies attempting to present their own version of the truth, often in an even-handed way, but occasionally in an insidious and very dangerous manner.
You must hone your validation techniques so that you can recommend websites which really are what they purport. The concepts of the 'grammar of the internet' can be put into practice here. Note that there are some truly shocking websites which lurk under the most inoffensive names. We are not going to supply any examples of these!
That brings us to the end of this section. You can review any topic by using the menu at the left-hand side of the screen, or you can move on to the next topic:Dark internet and the invisible web ...
