Huh? What is so amazing about the idea? There was WAIS, Gopher and a host of other such ideas that predated the web...
====================
Your technical assessment of the essay is accurate (he does indeed make several unfortunate mistakes) but I believe you allowed a focus on technical/historical gaffes to obscure his key point, which, regrettably, he failed to clearly state but which was discernible nonetheless.
People are able to create and distribute media via the web.
For the sake of argument, let's not dwell on the wildly varying quality of that media. If the web were developing today, instead of when it did, the intervention of corporations that have gone from merely vigilant to hyper-vigilant in their pursuit of profit via copyright acquisition, intellectual property enforcement, DRM and other mechanisms for accumulation by dispossession (the true engine powering Microsoft's efforts to create non open standards that lock users in) would, as Mr. Boyle wrote, mean a 'pay per view' model of net usage.
Content would come from one direction, just as it does in all other forms of media.
It's right and fitting to dampen the flames of web utopianism: the high flying, sunshine lit argument that the web is 'revolutionary'. Counter Utopians have a lot of ammunition on their side (such as the fact of cat blogs) to shoot down the sort of people Joel Spolsky calls "architecture astronauts"
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/25.html>
But utopian rhetoric aside, it's undeniable that a network which permits Chuck0's Infoshop to enter the data stream without startup costs of millions of dollars, that grants me fairly close to real time access, thanks to their blogs, to the digitally filmed dispatches of friends and colleagues in Seoul and Tokyo, that allows artists to circumvent the RIAA by participating in MPERIA, that makes scholarly opinion on the ME available at Juancole.com is, while perhaps not 'revolutionary', surely a non-trivial development.
None of this would be possible, I suspect, (or, it would be much, much more expensive) if our barbarian horde of hyper-vigilant corporations, now aware of the web as a profit vector, competitor for consumer attention and, from their fevered POV, intellectual property destroyer, were present and accounted for at the start to steer the thing's direction.
This, I believe, is Mr. Boyle's point.
.d.