And people focused on HTTP because it mostly worked as everyone adopted NAT routers, as home networks grew beyond what your local expert was willing to support. NAT's implied firewall made security (and uselessness) the default, and was good enough to get paid.
You can see other echos of NAT in today's slow adoption of IPv6... Since lots of software thinks it can safely run on a LAN without you caring about it, lots of systems (even Linux environments) start up with that in mind (even if only subtly, by listening on all interfaces instead of just localhost), and that fosters the fear of dropping that NAT firewall, which is the obstacle to decentralized (and truly competitive) services.
This is the best summary of What's Wrong With The Internet that I've read for some time.