2000: Information from: http://downtothewire.co.nz

“The Dotcom Crash”
Billions of dollars of investment in late '90s Internet ideas that were failing to show returns finally reached a head in March 2000. If only we had noticed sooner that ‘Information Superhighway’ was an anagram for ‘New utopia? Horrifying sham!’.

New Zealand was not totally isolated from the crash. In 2000, around 20 of our ISPs were either acquired or went out of business. Competition between the big ISPs and the several ‘free access’ ISPs was driving the price from around $40/month for flat-rate to $25 by the end of the year making it an unprofitable market for many businesses. High profile ISP Ihug is forced to abandon is initial public offering (the holy grail of financial windfall strategies for technology companies during the bubble) and lays off 60 staff by the year’s end.

Big Sister Helen?
The NZ e-government programme and the E-government Unit were formally
established 1 July 2000. Despite firm guidelines, many government departments refuse to work together on standards and a common look and feel for their 52 websites. They make arbitrary decisions until Cabinet is forced to intervene.

The Mobile(ish) Internet
Thee Nokia 7110 handset, designed to look like Matrix lead character Neo's phone, was a very popular choice after its NZ release in 2000. What some purely fashion-conscious purchasers didn't realise was that they were holding the world's very first WAP phone.

Formatting Standards: Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
CSS would make web pages appear radically different and more magazine-like in the Internet’s second decade. And a minor function of Internet Explorer 5 – XMLHTTP – would eventually be uncovered and used by cunning web coders to create web pages that worked more like desktop applications.