In one of the most significant antitrust actions of the century, attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia joined the Justice Department in federal lawsuits against the world’s most powerful software company. The case, which would go on for the next several years, was a pivotal juncture for the technology industry, the legal community, the stock market, and just about anyone who used a personal computer or the Internet.

March: Web becomes king of all media as web users spend more time surfing the Internet than watching TV. Everything with a reason as there are 300 million pages online and another 1.5 million added daily. As such the traffic on the Internet is doubling every 100 days.

September: The Starr Report, filled with lurid Monica Lewinsky details, is released online, making for what’s called the busiest day in Internet history so far.

Yahoo! wannabe Google, opens for business in a garage in Menlo Park, California.

November: Battered Netscape bows out of the browsers war, makes public its code for Mozilla, an open-source browser and agrees to sell to AOL for $4.2 billion

December: Stock analyst Henry Blodget sets a $400 price target for Amazon shares. A year later, it tops out at $600.

The final 21 unwired countries come online. The Web is now truly global.

In other news:

• music industry up in arms as fans download MP3 sound files for free
• internet economy gets its own weekly magazine: The Industry Standard
• Associated Press sells online archive service to newspapers. There are 3.250 newspapers and 1.280 TV stations which have online websites.
• 150 million Internet users estimated by the end of the year, half of them in US