MIcrosoft was integrating Internet Explorer into it's desktop so that other web browsers couldn't be used. Microsoft's HTML generator program was also using defaults that made pages written with it display poorly on browsers that obeyed internet standards. Because of Microsoft's market share, this was obvious tactics to monopolize the internet.
One of the holdovers of this is that the "normal" type size for web pages is 16 point, unlike print which the normal size is 12 point.