I can’t help wonder how different the world would have been with Gore as president. Even social media may have been regulated differently with a moderately (or even slightly) tech savvy administration, though that’s probably a stretch.

It’s not a stretch. The antitrust lawsuits brought by nine states and the Justice Department against Microsoft was made to simply go away under the Bush administration. Our technology would probably look very different today without Microsoft’s monopoly, and without that who knows what the rest of the map would look like?