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.
His was a reactionary voice. There was a lot of "the internet is going to change EVERYTHING" sentiment in the air then. It was finally start to burst on to the public's radar, and a lot of the people who were already online saw it as the beginning of the end - which it was, of course. The beginning of eternal September.
Your analysis of the author not being forward looking is on the mark. Certainly the internet was a lot more than just Usenet by 1995. The popular site names were different, the graphics were worse and things took a damn long time to load, but otherwise it really wasn't that unrecognisable from today. From my memory the internet in the mid-90s consisted of porn, chat sites, personal web pages and fan sites. Sound familiar?