In January 1993, idle regulators at the FCC belatedly discover the burgeoning world of online services…. The FCC immediately determines that the lack of interoperability among the online systems harms consumers and orders that each company submit a technical framework by January 1994 under which all online companies will unify to one shared technology in the near future….

In late 1993, AOL and Delphi become the first online services to offer the Internet. The FCC orders both to drop the feature until the FCC’s labs approve it…. In September 1996, Microsoft, whose biggest individual stockholders are Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, who are raising millions for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, wins the FCC’s online design shootout. Microsoft calls its online-unifier “Bob.” … Nobody likes Bob. It’s slow and has a tendency to crash, resolving to a blank blue screen. Microsoft and the FCC promise fixes. The fixes are late, and the online services continue to bleed subscribers and losses.

In 2000, chronic problems with Bob cause the FCC to abruptly junk it completely. The FCC decides to subsidize the deployment of surplus Minitel terminals acquired from the French in a trade for one mothballed WWII aircraft carrier. The U.S. tech community recoils at the embrace of the Minitel, complaining that it’s worse than a toy. The Minitel is a slow “dumb terminal,” less upgradable than even the despised Bob system, they squeal. But the commission, vowing a new localism theme, also proposes a future regulatory regime in which municipalities will build, manage, and own Minitel systems. The only stumbling block for the FCC is that the Minitel systems are too backward to be retrofitted with a virtual V-chip….