The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it...only in the past 10 years...
You realize your analysis completely ignore the 2001 tech bubble?
Big corporations have known and invested heavily in the internet for a lot longer than the last 10 years (since 2007?!?)
They were interested/excited by it, but didn't fully get it. The internet was just then replacing walled gardens like aol and prodigy.
Most people used dial-up for many years, and that sort of piggy-backed on the common-carrier status of the landline phone companies. So there was plenty of competition there. Cable internet providers were new around that time, and competing with cheap and good-enough dial-up and roughly-equivalent DSL (which could deliver service from a third party, somewhat like dial-up, e.g. earthlink). So the idea of only having one fast-enough option for internet in your town was novel.
Further, there were far fewer paid online services. So there wasn't an ecosystem to support partnership/promotions/schemes like today.
You realize your analysis completely ignore the 2001 tech bubble?
Big corporations have known and invested heavily in the internet for a lot longer than the last 10 years (since 2007?!?)