No, they are middlemen. But they are also consolidated. And that need not have happened. See, hosting your own homepage is work, and it made some sense to farm out parts of the work that needed to be done to others, just like not everybody maintains their own car, but they do own their own car.
And now we have moved in a totally different direction, where all the would-be-small-middlemen and their functions have been absorbed into a couple of giant data warehouses/web properties. That's about as far away from the 'peer-to-peer' nature of the internet as you could be. Firewalls were also a huge nail in the coffin, the fact that to be able to securely connect a computer to the net at a consumer level your best bet is to make it a device that does not allow connections from the outside in.
Moore's Law will ensure the cycle will come back. When a smartphonesque device can robustly house your private cloud. At that stage the brick and mortar warehouses will have to offer other solutions than just enabling cloud services.
