It is not clear that this model has survived increase of scale, or impact with the commercial world, which happened at the same time. The lessons, though, have been well learned. The web, like IP, grew because it was decentralized. There was no central authority for web sites, so they could grow at will, appearing spontaneously. Bush's vision is of a decentralized academic society, in which no central figure or library is essential to the process.
Decentralization is often a myth.
In real systems, the microscopic rules which ensure decentralization are enforced by some global authority if you peek under the covers. The IP protocols are defined in an RFC which sits at a definitive location. The happy intercourse between people in the street is safe only thanks to the kindly police officer on the corner and his hierarchical attachment to the supreme court. Fractal design That brings us to another interesting feature of topologies, and that is their variation with scale. It is like the tree outside my office window, but it is not like my office block, whose interesting features are limited to a rectangle maybe 100 meters long, windows around a meter wide, and rivets a few millimeters wide.