In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.

In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.

So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.