Web organization
taken from Wikipedia

In May 1994 the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since. In April CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the perturbation caused by the University of Minnesota announcing that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.
In September 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an industry organization, with Tim Berners-Lee as director.

1996-1998: Commercialization of the WWW
By 1996 it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional. Though at first people saw mainly the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. These concepts in turn intrigued many bright, young, often underemployed people (many of Generation X), who realized that new business models would soon arise based on these possibilities, and wanted to be among the first to profit from these new models.

Browser wars
Main article: Browser wars. For statistics, see Usage share of web browsers.
Given its early start, Netscape was the web browser of choice for approximately 80% of users in 1996. The release of Internet Explorer 4 in 1997 and the exploitation of its desktop operating system monopoly pushed Microsoft to about 90% market share by 2001 (when IE 6 was released). In 1998, Netscape released the source code of its flagship product as the open source browser Mozilla. It was soon decided that further development of the Netscape code base would be too complicated, and the browser was re-written from scratch. By 2006, Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox and other competition had reduced Internet Explorer's market share from its peak of about 95% down to around 85%.

1999-2001: "Dot-com" boom and bust
The low interest rates in 1998–99 helped increase the start-up capital amounts. Although a number of these new entrepreneurs had realistic plans and administrative ability, most of them lacked these characteristics but were able to sell their ideas to investors because of the novelty of the dot-com concept.
Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number of other technology-inspired booms of the past including railroads in the 1840s, radio in the 1920s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in the 1960s, and home computers and biotechnology in the early 1980s.
In 2001 the bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through their venture capital and failing to become profitable.