That same year, Congress authorized the National Science Foundation to connect the country’s research- and education-focused internet services to commercial networks. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. By the 2000s, companies including Amazon and eBay emerged as dominant players in the online retail space.
In the first decade of the 2000s, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram emerged, changing the way people connected, created and shared content. By around 2015, more people accessed the internet from smartphones than from other kinds of computers. By the early 2020s, companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others starting rolling out advanced artificial intelligence systems to the public.