Though what allowed cable/DSL companies to move into the ISP business was the complete decoupling of content from access. In 1991, when there was no practical WWW and you navigated a bunch of proprietary content by typing in AOL keywords, a cable company would've had to implement a full graphical browser and a large library of content to be useful. By 1998, when we had Netscape and IE and Yahoo and millions of websites, those industries were all disaggregated and we just needed the pipes.

There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.