In November 1999, at the height of the e-commerce gold rush, a hearing in a Los Angeles courtroom wrenched open the fault lines that ran through the Internet.
On one side, eToys.com, the billion-dollar darling of Wall Street, the brain-child of Toby Lenk, one of the hottest entrepreneurs of his generation. On the other side, etoy.com, a group of cutting-edge European artists, hungry for fame, who used the internet as their canvas.
The struggle between them became known as the Toywar. It sharply focused attention on the conflict at the very heart of the Internet: was it for the joy of the many or the exponential profit of the few? Was cyberspace a revolutionary commerce-free public space, or was the new frontier an extension of the shopping mall?
Through the narrative of the battle Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler weave the history of seven years that changed the world forever: the conflict at the birth of the web; the invention of search engines; the battles over domain names and the discovery of the glittering promise of on-line retailing when the capital markets left reality behind. This is also the story of those extraordinary individuals: billionaires, eccentrics, visionaries, libertarians and hackers whose brilliance and ambition built the virtual world.
