There is nothing wrong with paying for knowledge, but for knowledge such as academic resources, it should be open source for readers to use for free, because for this kind of educational resources, it has a very strong positive externality, that is to say, making it public can not only promote the development of the whole economy and society, but also further promote the dissemination and development of knowledge and improve the utilization efficiency of these resources. However, due to the existence of payment mode, on the contrary, this knowledge will become an obstacle for people to carry out scientific research. Due to the high cost, many colleges and universities are also complaining that their fees are too high, which makes many colleges and universities unable to make rational use of their students because they bear very high funds, which is a huge obstacle to the basic research in China.

Most of the data sources of HowNet are scholars' own research results, but for HowNet, they often pay very low fees. For example, for a master's thesis, you only need to pay a few hundred dollars, and there is no particularly high reward for a doctoral thesis. If the author wants to consult his own paper, he still needs to pay, which is unreasonable in itself. More crucially, for these papers, this thing has a certain monopolistic behavior, and it is difficult to obtain these core journals and papers through other channels and methods. And for most graduates, their graduation thesis also needs to go through the website of HowNet. Therefore, to a certain extent, HowNet has a certain monopoly nature, and other enterprises have no way to compete effectively with it. Under such circumstances, the state must know the net. Moreover, every year, the funds of the knowledge network in major universities are rising gradually, which is also unfavorable to the educational development of colleges and universities.