John Collison on why the early 2000s had a Telco bubble, not a Dot-com bubble

John Collison talks about why the Dot-com bubble is a misnomer:

People don’t really remember this, but by market cap, the 2000 bubble was really a Telco bubble and not an internet bubble — in that the run-up of the WorldCom stock’s and companies like that, it was much larger in terms of total size than all the internet companies [at the time].

There’s some good reading to be done on what happened with that. It really drove a lot, you basically had all this investments and optimism around the growth of the internet.

I think it was WorldCom kept going around with this talking point of the internet is doubling every 4 months and it felt like it was going to the moon and bandwidth and things like this. That ended up with this incredible oversupply of internet capacity, fiber especially, that then made things really cheap for when everything washed out in 2001, 2002. And as a result, it was a platform on which everything else could build [upon] during that period following.