In hindsight, I think Microsoft was stopped from taking ownership of the internet back then (by bundling the Internet Explorer and taking control over the whole

In hindsight, I think Microsoft was stopped from taking ownership of the internet back then (by bundling the Internet Explorer and taking control over the whole experience, evolution of standards, etc.). It was already (very!) close back then, it still took a decade to reverse that. Now we are dealing (among others) with the same topic, but are already much deeper in the swamp: Several companies are actively working to replace the internet with a walled abstraction they own and monetize, for more than a decade now, trying to argue "it's not the internet, it's an app!" or "it's not the internet, it's a profile-page on our portal!" IMO we're deeper in it now, because of how much better these arguments seem to work now among tech-people I talk to (compared to how futile Microsoft's arguments were for tech-people back then)