Source: Town Hall
by Stephen Moore
“At the birth of the internet age in the early 1990s, the U.S. and Europe took opposite approaches to advancing this new economy-changing technology. Europe tried the approach of industrial policy: They allowed government to regulate, subsidize and then tax the swarm of new tech companies that emerged. Here in the U.S., Congress and the Clinton administration made a wiser choice. We passed laws that kept internet startups regulation-, tax- and lawsuit-free. It was the Wild West of startup technology companies. A Darwinian race to excellence and survival. Some of the big initial companies like AOL, Netscape and MySpace gave way to superior competitors like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. We all know the end of this story. For three decades America and Silicon Valley came to entirely dominate these earliest innings of the digital age.” (06/25/25)