Instead of comparing Xanadu to the Internet as a whole, it’s probably better to compare it to something like Wikipedia. It’s not really an Internet – it’s a centralized document control system. It’s the sort of system you’d imagine the FBI would use to store reports… before it started using Wiki-like systems.
It’s a lousy model for knowledge in general, though. And its disadvantages should be, by this point, fairly obvious. It’s the sort of thing you think up before you see how the uncontrolled chaos of the actual Internet served both to increase its accessibility (i.e., it is democratizing) and push its creative development (entirely new forms of expression have popped up and some have even become ubiquitous – blogs, tweets, whatever). It’s the system you toss out the window after you realize that all of that “granular” attention to detail isn’t actually necessary at all, and is probably counterproductive.
Xanadu has no room for any of that. Any system whose specs that throws around the word “secure” probably doesn’t have much room for that. The Internet isn’t very “secure” – and that’s what makes it work, for the most part. (Some little segments of it, we hope are secure, like our online banking. But we don’t want the entire Internet to be that way.)
And the idea that simply putting information out there will cure scientific ignorance and produce political harmony is a fallacy that should have been stamped out fifty years ago, yet is still blissfully held on to. There’s no reason to suspect people work in this way, and much evidence to show quite conclusively that they don’t.
Xanadu is not a joke… but it is a failure, and a rightful one.