It's the cost of it working at all, at least in terms of it being as accessible as it is:
Making it feasible for people to create websites quickly enough to be worthwhile entailed allowing the tag soup non-standard HTML we see in practice now, and the confluence of desire and technical limitations made plug-ins inevitable.
A "better-regulated" Internet wouldn't have had the Web at all. Remember that, according to the people using it circa 1988, file transfer and hypertext were both solved problems, with FTP and Gopher respectively already in existence. Unstructured hypertext, something Gopher was not really designed for, wasn't especially desired until some random at CERN released WorldWideWeb and httpd to the world.
Making it feasible for people to create websites quickly enough to be worthwhile entailed allowing the tag soup non-standard HTML we see in practice now, and the confluence of desire and technical limitations made plug-ins inevitable.
A "better-regulated" Internet wouldn't have had the Web at all. Remember that, according to the people using it circa 1988, file transfer and hypertext were both solved problems, with FTP and Gopher respectively already in existence. Unstructured hypertext, something Gopher was not really designed for, wasn't especially desired until some random at CERN released WorldWideWeb and httpd to the world.