Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today.
Most things people say about HN comments aren't true in general, but only of the subset of comments that the person happens to notice. And we notice the things we dislike way more than we notice everything else.
The antitrust case didn't have much to do with Microsoft's loss of dominance to Google, Apple, Amazon and FB.
Could it be worse than the bloated javascript ad-ridden social media hellscape we have today? All Microsoft "did" to the internet was abandon development on their dominant browser as a way to keep developers on the Windows platform. And lo-and-behold, _market forces_ foiled their plans on that one, not the government.
If anything did the internet in, it was the iPhone and the mass adoption of smartphones afterwards, which brought in untold numbers of tech-illiterate consumers to be easily exploited by our current crop of Evil Tech Companies.
Compared to Uber, Google, Facebook and Theranos, Gates and co are saints. The standard for "evil" has shifted a lot since the 90s, now those look like innocent times!