this is a dead channel but i like the mod, so heres some suggestions i thought of on the bus home.
messaging, social media, and anything else related to the world wide web, should have the max user cap be based on the amount of total sales/users from all browsers. (since thats how people find and access those sorts of services).
for what tech comes out at what point for some of these services which rely on networking, i would recommend looking into the IETF and all the improvements they've made to better utilize & optimize the internet.
a good example is udp, released in 1980 it is an unreliable way of sending data, before 1980 video streaming was impossible and instead people would have to download the entire video file using the only protocol avaliable (tcp). because of udp today we can see streams, watch movies online via netflix, etc.
another thing is malware, viruses, etc. i don't know if its impossible or something but instead of having it gain the company who made it a incredible amount of money at the risk of getting caught, i think it'd be better to have it basically target certain software / operating systems to try and bring the oppositions software down so (potentially) yours can get the people who leave that system.
to make sure it is both realistic and balanced so the ai can use it against both the player and each other, make it less effective the less bugs are in the target software. since typically bugs in software can lead to big vulnerabilities which can be exploited.
also for hardware try to make sure it doesn't spam companys specialized in it since from what i've seen in another hardware mod, they just cannot seem to produce enough income early on.