Let’s get something straight about the dot.com ‘bust’: Whenever I see articles like this BBC piece about a study showing, “the web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom,” it reminds me how utterly entrenched is the myth the “dot.com bust” had something to do with usage of the Internet. The “bust” was a financial market crash related to speculative investing in internet-related business ventures. People didn’t stop using the Internet in 2001. Investors may have stopped investing. IT departments may have slowed down buying. Tech companies stopped advertising. But the Internet did not stop growing.
