The main difference is that in the 90s, the US still had real physical activity underlying its economy, and pretty impressive at that. You smack Microsoft, but who cares - there's still a wide industrial base, hundreds of thousands of small to medium enterprises, global monopoly on entertainment, semiconductor supremacy, high-end aircraft and car manufacturing, etc.

That's gone - industry got outsourced, the gap between Intel and TSMC is growing every year, Boeing's reputation will unlikely to ever recover, Hollywood is a joke, oil and gas extraction is perceived as villains, journalism in terminal decline, finance and pharma pure rent seeking. Software is the only thing left where Americans can say with a straight face that they're proud of it - hence the unwillingness to taint the crown jewels

> I wonder where we got off track.

We stopped enforcing the law against large companies. :(

Apple's behavior today on iOS is clearly worse than 90's era Microsoft Windows, but we had a semi-functional FTC back then, and we mostly don't today.

When was the smack down?