The thinking was, and IMHO there's some merit to this, "giant new tech companies are going to be created by this thing called the web, so maybe legacy companies

The thinking was, and IMHO there's some merit to this, "giant new tech companies are going to be created by this thing called the web, so maybe legacy companies need to divest / merge to meet the competition." And I'd argue a lot of non-defense government philosophy was also following DoD's "the Cold War is over, budgets will shrink, so defense companies need to merge to survive."