the year the internet got in trouble
1999 gave us Napster, the peer-to-peer service that let anyone share MP3s directly with anyone else, no record store required. It also gave the music industry an aneurysm and a lawsuit that shut Napster down by 2001 — but not before it proved, for better or worse, that a lot of people would rather download something than buy it. The genie stayed out of the bottle; the services that followed just got more careful about copyright.
This was also peak instant messaging: ICQ (1996) invented the "uh oh" notification sound, AOL Instant Messenger turned away-messages into a whole teenage art form, and a generation learned to type "brb" faster than they could say it out loud. Meanwhile, web forums and bulletin boards — built on software like phpBB and vBulletin — became the default home for any community too niche for a mainstream site: a band's fanbase, a hobby, a hometown.
And the whole time, the calendar was ticking toward the Y2K bug — the fear that systems storing years as two digits would break when "99" rolled over to "00". Billions were spent fixing it in advance. When midnight hit, mostly nothing happened, which is either the best possible outcome or proof the fix worked, depending who you ask.