Perhaps. A key difference though - history files can include the individual pages I requested from the same host. Right now I have like 50 entries for the various posts I read just from HackerNews, all as separate line items etc etc.

In the case of the phone, one simply sees recipient of call, duration etc, regardless of how much information was exchanged. The phone I'm calling is arguably analogous to the server I request a page from, in the metadata context.

I'd argue browser history is significantly richer in some regards due to this. It's not unheard of for user identifiers to appear in URL paths either - try visiting https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=<HN user name>... In my Chrome, that's instantly in the history file with my username.