And yet, it was. America took the early internet more seriously than any other nation, and owned the new, digital era as a result. From 1997 to 2001, the United States spent an average of 1.1% of GDP on the Internet, or more than $300 billion in today’s dollars. This investment laid a foundation robust enough to survive even a historic boom-and-bust cycle, and to support what would become the world’s most important and largest companies.
Today, 19 of the world’s top 25 companies are American, and none are Japanese.
America won not because it learned how to manufacture cars and consumer electronics better than Japan, but because the American economy was a more fertile ground for early internet companies like Netscape, AOL, Amazon, and Google — and because American capital markets exuberantly doused those companies, and hundreds more, with the capital they needed to build infrastructure, to recruit the world’s top engineers, and to onboard millions of people onto the internet. Or in short, because America’s economy was dynamic enough to seize a new opportunity, and Japan’s was not.