Publisher's Synopsis
This is a story of the battle for the control of the Internet. In November 1999, at the height of the e-commerce gold rush, an extraordinary hearing took place in a Los Angeles courtroom. On one side, the billion-dollar darling of Wall Street, eToys.com, the brain child of Toby Lenk. On the other side, etoy.com, a group of cutting-edge European artists, hungry for fame, who used the Internet as their canvas. The ensuing battle 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 public space or was the new frontier an extension of the shopping mall?;Through the story for the Toywar, Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler weave the history of the seven years that changed the world forever. The main question was this: in 2000, as the on-line world went into melt-down, what would be more valuable and enduring, a ten billion dollar corporation created by the best American entrepreneurs or a chaotic art project by a group of anarchic European rebels?
