2015 will be defined by the Revenge of '90s Internet: media and tech giants flirting with each other, dominant players throwing their weight around, and portals, portals everywhere. And CES, starting this week , will offer a big glimpse into what all that '90s dark lipstick looks like on a modern face.

A lot of the best tech startups are ideas that have been around for years but the time is finally right.

So it's worth noting that the broad outlines of tech in 2015 look surprisingly like the late '90s. The major players are set up the same, the fights are the same, and the mistakes will almost certainly be the same. It's going to be pretty fun until it all blows up, actually — some of these ancient dreams might finally come true.

Google is the new Microsoft; Qualcomm is the new Intel

Google has been the new Microsoft for so long that this shouldn't surprise anyone: nearly everything that happens on the internet touches Google in some way, giving the company nearly incomprehensible power. It's way beyond obvious things like search and YouTube, each of which are behemoths in their own right — it's all the way down to Google's DoubleClick for Publishers ad server and Google Analytics, which sit behind almost every major website. (Like this one, for instance.)

Google knows so much about how people spend their time and money on the web that it can easily make or break any new businesses it wants. This power is so huge that European countries keep threatening to break Google up, just as Microsoft was constantly under regulatory threat at home and abroad. And Google's ever-increasing complexity means that it will eventually create opportunities for competitors with simpler, more focused products to come along and disrupt it, just as Google and the web disrupted Microsoft and Windows.

The coming Sensor explosion is a dangerous moment for Qualcomm

But while the Google / Microsoft comparison is fairly obvious, no one seems to be paying attention to Qualcomm's incredible chipset dominance in mobile. Android and Snapdragon look an awful lot like Windows and Intel; every hardware maker except for Apple is beholden to the two giants behind the platform. (And even Apple uses Qualcomm's LTE radios and other chips in the iPhone.) Qualcomm has an incredible patent moat and it seems to be pushing Snapdragon along right on schedule, but that's exactly where Intel was before the smartphone explosion sent its roadmap spinning wildly off course. The coming explosion of internet of things devices, wearables, and other sensor-laden gadgets is a huge opportunity for every company that failed in mobile, and a dangerous moment for Qualcomm.

Facebook is the new AOL

Just think about it for a minute. Of course Facebook is the new AOL. Facebook is the beginning and the end of the internet for a huge number of normal people, a combination of primary service provider (user profiles, messaging, photo sharing) and '90s-style portal to the wider web. Facebook has its own IM platform, Messenger, just like AOL had AOL Instant Messenger. Then it went and bought WhatsApp, the messaging platform more popular internationally, just like AOL bought ICQ. Facebook groups are just AOL chat rooms; Facebook's permanently doomed commerce plays are AOL's permanently doomed commerce plays. (AOL's ultimate doomed ecommerce play? The acquisition of Netscape.)

And Facebook's core business of selling ads into the News Feed is the same combination of incredibly vulnerable and apocalypse-proof as AOL's dial-up business: it will continue minting money for as long as the parents and grandparents of the world start their day with Facebook, and it will stop growing the second all of their kids move on to something better.

The only remaining move is for Facebook to up and buy a media company

You can keep going: Facebook is now pitching itself to media companies as their savior, just as AOL once did. Most websites get a tremendous amount of traffic from Facebook; it's only a matter of time before Facebook starts aggressively charging for that traffic. And there's word that Facebook even wants media companies to start publishing directly onto Facebook's platform, ostensibly in the name of a better user experience — being kicked from the Facebook app to a browser or web view on mobile kind of sucks, after all. That's a play straight out of the AOL playbook; the only remaining move is for Facebook to up and buy a media company of its own, just like AOL spent the 90s building up to its disastrous January 2000 purchase of Time Warner.

You're laughing, but there's an old media company — probably a cable network scared to death of YouTube — looking at Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post and thinking hard about how to sell itself to Facebook.