The dotcom bubble created a bear market for equities that dragged down mutual fund performance and cost general investors --- the "smart" ones, who weren't picking stocks, or even verticals --- hundreds of billions of dollars.
Hundreds of billions is tiny compared to what's at risk this time. I witnessed massive fraud in the dot-com bubble. Very little went punished. I have no idea what the new regulations need to look like. But they need to have real teeth and need a reasonable sized army of experts overseeing the regulations. The SEC of the last 10 years was woefully understaffed to deal with our financial industry's activity.
In defence of the dotcom bust, it had very little time to embed it's make believe assets into other parts of the economy. Perhaps if it had inflated slightly slower, it would have managed to affect non internety investments.
