(And this is where I usually rant about, so why not again, the massive harm of suppression of P2P and related research post-Napster; copyright has corrupted and centralized the technical direction of the net, nevermind its attendant business-reasons for centralization.)

There is certainly a lot of truth to that. Still, it seems that the push for a receive-mostly internet is to the interest of most actors with any degree of influence. There are (or used to be) some technical reasons (and business considerations) for NATting home routers and the comically asymmetrical (and static) ADSL up/down split. Yet I can't shake off the feeling that the political significance of imposing the need for intermediation in most communication between individuals was not lost on the actors of that time, even at a less-than-conscious, fuzzy level.

And let us not go into the significance of tying most higher-level communications infrastructure to protocols where the resources one needs to transmit scale linearly with the number of listeners, HTTP being the most prominent example (obvious analogy to TV/Radio omitted).

Not implying any conspiracy here of course, simply players each acting in their own interest.