I am a true son of the Web and support it in all of its shining glory. If we are going to split hairs, the Internet is not an Information Superhighway. We don't spend all of our time traveling from one place to another, we can't put up signs by the side of the road. The Internet is more like breaking into warp drive and jetting from planet to planet. All that aside, I think that the reason that people call the web publishing is because they are trying to use a common frame of reference to deal with a novel, alien idea.
Publishing comes about as close as anything to describing what does happen.
If someone has a better metaphor, I'd like to hear it. In the meantime, I don't think that we are going to enlighten the newbies about cyberspace, the web, and all of its various facets without streaching quite a few analogies and definitions to the extreme. This is a fake email address. So many old members of this list were getting spam generated from siphons trolling the archives that I replaced all email addresses with randomly generated spam traps that forward mail to spam fighters. If you need to reach individuals mentioned in these archives, use a search engine to find their current location, as these addresses and archives date from 1994 to 1996.