In the spring of 2000, I flew to Houston to get the company I had helped build get out of a bad contract I had helped get signed.
I was on the executive team of Interliant, an application service provider that had gone public the summer before. On paper, the stock and options I was sitting on made me a real, live internet millionaire. Of course, paper is just paper.
The contract at question was for bandwidth, one of our biggest costs. A year earlier I had helped lock in what we thought was a great deal with Bernie Ebber's MCI WorldCom. We could buy as much bandwidth connectivity as we could use and more. We felt good about it. Costs locked in, we could plan around it.
Within a year, the street price of that same bandwidth had collapsed by nearly half, and it was still falling. A dozen companies were racing to bury fiber-optic cable across the country faster than anyone could possibly use them. So when a company got in touch to say they were setting up a commodity-style trading operation for bandwidth, one that could swap our high-priced contract for street pricing, our CEO, COO, and I got on a plane.
They put us up in a conference room at the top of a glass tower in downtown Houston. Around a large oval table sat eight or nine of their people, and my CEO noticed the thing that should have told us everything before a word was spoken: No two of them were from the same division. Trading. Broadband. Network. Finance. Another from a department none of us could quite identify. They had been assembled to explain a deal that made less sense the longer they explained it, something about buying our bandwidth from us and then selling it back to us, repriced along the way. They explained it with total confidence and complete fluency.
The company was Enron.
We didn't do the deal, which is one of the better decisions I have been part of. Within two years Enron was a synonym for fraud, WorldCom had collapsed in the largest bankruptcy in American history to that point, the fiber that a dozen companies had raced to bury was trading for pennies on the dollar, and the stock and options that had made me a paper millionaire were paper again. The bandwidth kept getting cheaper the whole way down. The thing that took me twenty years to fully understand was this: The collapse wasn't the end of the story. It was the middle. The cheap bandwidth that ruined the men who built the fiber became the free raw material for everything that came after, the web, the cloud, the streaming economy, a generation of companies built on top of a network they never had to pay full price for.
I didn't know it that afternoon in Houston, but I was watching the fourth great build-out learn a lesson that three generations of infrastructure builders had learned before it. Twenty-five years later, the fifth build-out is spending ten times the money, and the question this book exists to ask is whether anyone in the room has done the reading.
From the prologue of The Indispensability Trap by Alan Shimel. © 2026 Alan Shimel.