Early internet popularity was constrained by dial-up speed and uncertain commerce through 2000

Evidence

But the site’s dominance was possible only in a primordial era of online culture. Slow dial-up modem connections constrained early internet activities to emailing, chatting with friends on apps like AOL Instant Messenger, reading text-heavy news sites such as the Drudge Report, and trading digital music files. E-commerce felt uncertain and risky; Amazon only sold books, CDs, and DVDs. While the internet seemed to hold vast potential for profitability, the dot-com crash of 2000 showed that no one had yet figured out a sustainable business model, even with 361 million people worldwide online. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 164

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the tech-constraint argument (slow connections = fragmented culture) actually explain monoculture collapse, or is it post-hoc?
• XREF: connects to: The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 283; The early Internet nearly died from lack of demonstrated usefulness. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 641; The millennium marked a visible migration of mass attention from television to the internet — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 857