Twenty years and a month ago, Bill Gates, then chairman and CEO of Microsoft, made his first appearance before Congress. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gates defended against the accusation that his company was a monopoly. Antitrust investigations into the company had been ongoing for almost a decade by then, since the George H.W. Bush administration. The ubiquity of Microsoft’s operating systems had raised initial concern, but Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s entry into the web-browser marketplace, had stoked further worry. Given Microsoft Windows’ 90 percent market penetration at the time, government and industry worried that the company would use that position to charge fees or otherwise control access to the internet, an important new tool for personal and business uses. The hearings, hopelessly distant in technological time, are worth revisiting today. Utah senator Orrin Hatch chaired the committee at the time of the Microsoft testimony; two decades later, Hatch interrogated Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s business model, eliciting the CEO’s smirksome answer, “Senator, we run ads.”

Much has changed since 1998. Then, the monopoly power of a computer-software giant was on trial, rather than a global notice board that let loose enough personal data to undermine democracy. At issue back then wasn’t just reining in Microsoft on antitrust grounds, but also ensuring that computing’s future couldn’t be governed by one corporation, particularly on the matter of how the internet was going to impact ordinary life.

But the role of computing has changed since Gates’s testimony. The computer ceased to be a servant of human life and began to be the purpose for which that life is conducted. That’s the heart of the problem with the technology industry today, and it’s a problem that data-privacy regulation alone has no hope of fixing.

It wasn’t just members of Congress upset with Microsoft, back then. The heads of competing tech firms also took issue with the company’s size. Netscape Communications, makers of the first popular web browser, were among those asserting Microsoft’s monopoly, as was Sun Microsystems, a computer-server company that developed the Java platform in the early 1990s. Sun’s CEO, Scott McNealy, offered this testimony: "We think, left unchecked, Microsoft has a monopoly position that they could use to leverage their way into banking, newspapers, cable, and broadcasting, Internet service providers, applications, data bases browsers. You name it."

McNealy was right to worry about consolidation in tech, but wrong to peg Microsoft as its perpetrator. Fast forward twenty years, and Zuckerberg was asked similar questions: Is Facebook a media company? A financial services company? An application company? Google, which was still just a Stanford lab experiment when Gates testified, provides broadband services and owns YouTube, a new kind of broadcaster. Sun, by contrast, no longer exists. It was absorbed into Oracle in 2009. Facebook now occupies the site of its former campus. But in the ’90s, it was hard to foresee that the dominance McNealy feared Microsoft might entrench would be realized instead by a few start-ups that didn’t exist yet. In 1994, the Justice Department demanded that Microsoft not use its dominant position in operating systems to quash competition. Some opponents considered the details a wrist-slap, but that didn’t stop the government from intervening in Microsoft’s plans to bundle internet-service software, including the Internet Explorer browser, in versions of Windows. After years of rulings and appeals in the antitrust case—including a failed attempt to break up the company—the government and Microsoft settled in 2001, although it took until 2004 for various state appeals to run their course.

Something else happened during those years. The period between 1994 and 2001 witnessed the rise of the commercial internet. Netscape Navigator was released in December 1994. By 1999, hundreds of tech companies had gone public, some enjoying sevenfold increases on their first day of trading. By March of 2000, the bubble had started to burst, and by the end of the year, the sector had lost $1.7 trillion in value. Then came 9/11, followed by the Enron and Worldcom scandals. By September 2002, the nasdaq, where most technology stocks were traded, was down almost 77 percent from its 2000 high. A few long-term survivors scraped through, among them Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! (until recently, anyway). But this period is most often associated with excess and folly. Companies like Pets.com and eToys.com raised and spent huge sums of money to sell commodity goods online. Content portals like Lycos, GeoCities, and Broadcast.com enjoyed multibillion-dollar acquisitions. Convenience sites like Webvan and Kozmo.com offered delivery of groceries and snacks within minutes—Kozmo would even deliver a single ice-cream bar for free. Dot-com profligacy included multimillion-dollar parties, decadent offices, and expensive Super Bowl advertisements, all paid for by enormous net operating losses.