While young Martin was happily buzzing the windows of his MSN buddies, and dads around the world were ecstatic about seeing stock quotes in AOL, some idealistic nerds had a really different vision for the future of the internet. People like Tim Berners-Lee were quietly working on something called the world wide web, where any user's computer could connect to any website, not just the handful of companies that AOL struck a business development deal with, and where the network itself would be fully open and decentralized.
This is misleading bordering on revisionist. The internet AOL had made available to everyone (e.g. their famous email being delivered over SMTP to anyone, whether or not in that handful of companies) was already something created by "idealistic nerds" to be fully open and decentralized. It's weird to present the web as some "idealistic" new way of doing things, when the AOL model was by far the outlier, and HTTP/HTML was more of a continuation of the model that had already been humming along for decades (which AOL had hopped onto and done such a wonderful business by capitalizing.)