To answer this question, I will tell a little story. Pretend that you have a dirt road somewhere. This road represents the Internet (you may see what I'm getting at already). A few people built this dirt road many years ago (in the late 60's) so they could (at the risk of sounding like Ma Bell) reach out and touch each other a little easier. For many years, this dirt road was fine for it's purpose. Traffic flowed without problem. It was great for the purpose that it was meant for.
One day, some guy named Al Gore shows up. He has this idea for a giant superhighway. Don't ask me why, but people really like this idea of having eight lanes of traffic coming right through their living rooms. A mob of people goes out looking for whatever they can get. In their frenzied search, the mob eventually reaches this quiet dirt road.
Hungry for anything they can drive on, they all abruptly decide that this must be the superhighway that Al Gore was talking about all of this time. Instantly this humble dirt road is mobbed with everything from Yugos to Lamborghinis. Nobody seems to care that their precious little superhighway isn't even paved. It's the thought that counts, apparently. The whole world flocks to this "superhighway" (I think my symbolism is fairly obvious at this point,) so companies everywhere start advertising on this superhighway. Pretty soon, you have billboards spaced six inches apart. They use their TV ads to tell people to come see their billboards! Needless to say, we have a little bit of a mess here.
My point should be clear by now: Even though everybody talks about this wonderful "Information Superhighway" and "Cyberspace," we really don't have much more than a dirt road! On that other medium of uniform national blandness (television) we already think there are too many commercials as is. The way things are going, there will be more "commercials" on the net than content! In other words, we'll have this monstrosity of a superhighway paved with billboards!
Okay. Now to get off my digitally-rendered VRML soapbox and tell a story of the good old days of the Internet. I was on the Internet about a year before anyone whose head wasn't pointed even heard the words "Information Superhighway," and Java was still another word for coffee. The only web browser was made by NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, for those of you who think life begins and ends with Netscape.) Sure it couldn't do much more than put up a page with a light gray background, some formatted text and a few pictures, and most of the content required a pocket protecter to be understood, but the net had more of a quiet atmosphere, sort of like a small town. There were few rules, since everyone policed themselves on the net. Ideas could be freely exchanged, and the information flowed freely. It's hard to imagine that this was only about three years ago.
Now we have a total mess. The original purpose of the Internet is all but lost, since there is so much traffic. Everything moves at a snail's pace (I only have a 14.4 modem, so I don't notice it as much.) There are still few rules, but this now amounts to virtual anarchy. Any time someone tries to add rules, some massive opposition group is more than willing to form merely to oppose it. We have to wonder how much more of this the Internet can take before a total meltdown occurs. . .
What we have here is a failure to communicate.