In 1997, a young FCC lawyer specializing in internet policy wrote an influential working paper that predicted the explosive growth of the internet and what it meant for regulators. Back then, dial-up internet access was the norm. In three years, regulators would worry that AOL’s merger with Time Warner would lead to market domination — a reasonable fear at the time that seems misplaced in today’s broadband world. Google was still a Stanford research project, Facebook did not yet exist and most people had flip phones; Apple’s iPhone would not be unveiled for another decade.
