No. The Internet never claimed to be a bastion of immutable objective truth, unlike Ethereum. Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not. It's also poorly designed even though we know better, whereas at least the early internet was more or less as well designed as we knew how to do at the time.

"Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not." Really? I recall them having 3-4 stages before they called it done, the first of which called itself "frontier" precisely to discourage folks from thinking it was ready.

That said, I was somewhat horrified to see something as large as the DAO launch on an alpha platform, and not surprised to see it tank. Maybe Ethereum core developers in unofficial channels were more cavalier about its current state, but as a casual follower who read their blog for a while, I never got the impression presented in your comment.

"Information Superhighway"?

I guess the point is that the Internet was not nominally valued at $1B in the early days (depending on how you define that).

It doesn't matter that the Internet wasn't valued at $1B. What matters is that it was just as crazy in the minds of some to trust your money on the Internet in the early days.

Sure. It also could have been said about pets.com in the early days.