In all fairness, I don't know whether he actually believed such then or whether development of the TCP/IP stack was behind of schedule and he just wanted to set expectations.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-04-11-19941011...
Looks like at the time the interest in the 'information superhighway' from MS was in proprietary services which were more like cable pay-per-view. That the term later was a synonym for the World Wide Web is misleading.
I guess similar terms today would be Web3 or Metaverse where lots of industry players agree it is desirable but don't agree on what it would look like. A buzzword.
well the Microsoft attempt was making an AOL-like half-assed contracted ISP (MSN) to compete with Excite/Yahoo/Lycos so they could shove ad-like experiences into peoples browser start page.
Let's hope the web3/metaverse turns out a bit more user-oriented -- 90s web companies were brutal.
The original version stated "today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway". Before publication Gates realized the internet was gaining critical mass and he redirected the company to become internet-focused. And then the new version of the book was created.