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My family first got online with Prodigy dial-up when I was 8. We connected to it via a local phone number, and so I thought that meant the offices of our local phone operator down the street was where “internet” lived. As I got older I began to understand it was far more complex than that.

One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a tall man named Craig. He spoke in a loud, but friendly, North Carolina accent that likely wouldn’t make you think he was the kind of guy who gets really into computers. With his characteristic strawberry-blond horseshoe mustache, he looked, talked and even dressed like a long-lost cousin of Dale Earnhardt.

But in the same way my dad just knew how to work on any car, Craig knew computers. Every so often he’d help my family out, upgrading our first desktop from a 2GB hard drive to 8GB and later helping us make the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

I’ve been thinking about Craig recently because he was the first person I ever knew who worked in a data center. When I think about data centers, I still picture them exactly the way he described them: large, cold rooms filled with rows of whirring computers packed into racks and watched over day and night by people like him.

I can’t remember where Craig worked, and I may not have known at the time. For all I know, what he oversaw was a private network for a single company and not even part of the public internet. But the image sticks with me because it was likely the first time I understood, even vaguely, that rooms full of computers somewhere were doing something important enough that somebody had to watch over them day and night.

The DOJ is about to drop the biggest antitrust bomb since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer case.

In the late ’90s, bundling IE with Windows licenses played a big role in getting Microsoft labeled a monopoly and for good reason. IE’s complete stranglehold peaked at ~95% market share (150M users). Today Chrome’s “mere” 65% translates to 3+ billion users and gives Google far more control over the web than IE’s team could dream of.

The DOJ’s ideal solution? Make Google do what Microsoft probably should have done: spin off or sell off their browser.

But my question is: who on Earth could even buy it?