I feel like the reason the author got so much of his opinion piece wrong is because he does absolutely no looking forward. I mean, it probably was impossible to predict what the internet would become, but he only cites statistics from the current era and doesn't pause to consider how or if those statistics, and the experience of the internet as a whole, might be improved. Of course tablets were probably a far cry from anyone's imagination in those days, but for instance he talks about low government-related computer usage in a county in N.Y. Couldn't he see, for instance, that this was probably the first time it had been attempted? That perhaps, although there were many computer companies in that area, the actual residents didn't own that many computers (yet)? A much more accurate statistic would have been to see how many homeowners in the area actually had or used computers for pleasure, and then compare it to the read rate for the government bulletins. Of course, those statistics may not have been collected at the time.

I don't know what the internet was like in 1995. Was it only Usenet? Where there no separate websites or anything? I feel like the author shuts down the internet and views it as a frozen, solid entity that can't change in any way when he's writing this article, instead of considering potential innovations.

Maybe it was too early for any of them to be clearly visible.