@freakazoid The Public's headspace is very limited.

"The Internet" is a major conceptual element, it concerns communications, it can be used for publicly-accessible communications so it is.

There's also the cumulative effect of port-blocking and firewalls which restrict access to other protocols, so everything happens on :80 or :443.

See Meredith L. Patterson's excellent "On Port 80":

There’s been a joke for a few years now that all the web applications you’ve ever heard of are actually some other Internet protocol, reconfigured to answer on port 80, the standard port for (unencrypted) web traffic. Some of these parallels are obvious, and even more or less literal: Gmail is IMAP and SMTP, and Google Talk is (or was) XMPP, all on port 80 in the same browser window. Others are more metaphorical. Twitter is IRC on port 80, although one primarily listens to users instead of channels — but listening to channels is still possible, if one uses a client that can follow hashtags, and the syntax is even the same. Dropbox is FTP on port 80. Reddit is Usenet on port 80.

https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a

#OnPort80 #MeredithLPatterson #Usenet #Internet