I won't deny that the current Web is much more useful, on average, than it was back in the nineties when I started using it. On the other hand, during that tim

I won't deny that the current Web is much more useful, on average, than it was back in the nineties when I started using it. On the other hand, during that time the technology became immeasurably better - my first dial-up connection was 9.600 kbps if I remember correctly, now I have 4 Mbps; I didn't have a math co-processor back then and now we have multicore monsters of CPUs - and so on. The question (to me) is not if the current Web is more useful, but if the increase in usefulness is anywhere near the technological progress? At some point, the technological limits - like no YouTube because both the necessary download speeds and compression algorithms were not there - were replaced by something else. Back then we could believe that, in time, seeing the rate of progress, we'll get everything we ever wanted. The tech advanced and now we could have all these things we dreamed about, but don't - because of political and economic factors. Yes, the Web improved drastically, despite a couple missteps (like IE6) along the way. But I believe the improvement is much lesser than the current technology would enable were it not for non-technological factors. On the brighter side, once developed, technology is here to stay, so if we deal with all the current problems we'll be free to advance the Web further. But that's a pretty big "if"...