The internet is an academic curiosity, not a place to do business

What actually happened

This was mainstream, not fringe. Astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote a famous Newsweek piece in February 1995 arguing that online shopping and virtual communities were nonsense, that no database would replace a newspaper, and that the internet lacked the human touch commerce required. Robert Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet, predicted in 1995 that the internet would catastrophically collapse in 1996, and later ate a printed copy of his column on stage.

The reasoning was not stupid. In 1995 the web was slow, ugly, hard to find anything on, and had no working payment system or trust model. Amazon sold its first book in July 1995 and lost money for years. Search was terrible until PageRank. The objection was really about missing infrastructure, and the infrastructure got built: SSL, search, broadband, then smartphones.

The residue of this era is in the classroom itself. Schools taught the internet as a supplementary curiosity, put one connected machine in the library, and framed the whole thing as optional. ITU figures now put internet users above five billion, roughly two thirds of humanity.