The three letters to remember are not ETF but BTC.

Where did it go wrong? I can answer this. The web was proposed in 1989 but nobody cared. A follow up email was sent a year later, and the proposal had been completely forgotten about. It was allowed to continue as a side project, as long as it would not get in the way of the day job at CERN.

After it took off a bit it was presented at the hypertext conference. They said it did not have enough academic merit to make the main conference. But a demo was allowed in a back room. Two years later hypertext was all about the web.

In the Web's 3rd year (where nostr is now) there was a huge scaling debate. Both sides had merit. But the original idea of the web was for the browser to have control, but silicion valley particularly the browsers moved the control to the server. The orginal browser was a browser / EDITOR.

After the server got control it lead to business models around advertising, and after that, tracking users with personalized ads. And sometimes sending data to 3rd parties. Now we have regulations that must inform users of that (not everyone does). And the web itself has become slow, regulated, and privacy invasive.

The key things were the scaling debate, the shift from client to server, the advertising model, and privacy invasion. Each of these were battles that were fought and largely lost by the users, and won by firms and VCs. We have a chance to change things now, but we will need to win those battles that were lost before.