The money and the moniker

Conor Pope reviews Leaving Reality Behind: The Battle for the Soul of the Internet by Adam Wishart and Regula Boschler.

Conor Pope reviews Leaving Reality Behind: The Battle for the Soul of the Internet by Adam Wishart and Regula Boschler.

When the Net shifted from the impenetrable world of hard-core science into the mainstream in the mid- 1990s, the domain name game seemed to be the best way for the technically bereft to make money.

Forget the MBA, the science degree, the venture capitalism or the massive marketing spend - all you needed was a clever website address to flog to an eager e-entrepreneur with deep pockets.

Easy? Hardly. I was always just behind the game. Every address I thought of had been registered by some smart-alecky start-up in San Jose and the names and acronyms I chose which had yet to be registered met with blank stares and muttered swears from those I shared them with.

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Having missed out on the ireland.com domain name by a whisker - if only I'd taken the call offering it for sale - I struggled, albeit gently, for months without coming up with the stable of must-have addresses I needed to retire to a sun-kissed island in the Caribbean. Or even a rain-hugged one in the west of Ireland.

As the good times passed, the good names - and the terrible ones - disappeared. Those of us who had not staked any claim in cyberspace felt like pioneers arriving at the Yukon Peninsula in time to see the last train packed with smirking miners weighed down with our gold pulling out of the station.

And to think I could have registered etoy.com. Adam Wishart and Regula Boschler's Leaving Reality Behind: The Battle for the Soul of the Internet, is an engaging and accessible story detailing how the courtroom struggle for the right to use that name led indirectly to the spectacular collapse of an $8 billion company, eToys.com.

In 1995, a group of slightly pretentious (and plainly irritating) Swiss students registered the name etoy.com to promote their "art". The fact that this "art" relied a little too heavily on shaved heads, nuclear orange bomber jackets as well as CAPITAL LETTERS and A.GREAT.deal of ill-placed.punctuation hardly mattered. They organised "a digital hijack" on the Web and generated some interest across Europe before falling out and breaking up.

And so the story and their dream died, only to be resurrected when former Disney executive Toby Lenk's eToys.com emerged from idealab!, an incubator for new businesses in California. He set up his online toy store and watched investors tear each other to pieces for a piece of his company as it prepared for its IPO. The share price soared and within hours of its flotation in late 1999 the virtual toy store was worth more than its concrete rival Toys 'R' Us.

While it prepared to take over the world, eToys started tying up some loose ends, one of which involved shutting the inactive etoy.com site down. eToys.com claimed etoy.com infringed its trademark. It was concerned that it could receive bad press if people looking for Barbie dolls found themselves instead on etoy.com's "offensive, depraved, insane, obscene, prurient, perverse, destructive, anarchistic, rebellious and anti-social" homepage.

eToys.com first offered to buy the site for a pittance, an advance which was ignored. Then they threatened legal action. Then more money was offered and the threats became more serious.

This gave the artists from Zurich a cause and they refused to back down, claiming, with some justification, that they had registered and used the etoy.com domain name years before eToys.com existed. They successfully turned the whole event into a debate on the future of the Web and whether it should remain a haven of self-expression, free from all commercial pressures.

They declared a Toywar. The eToys.com site was hacked and spammed and Web warriors fought against "a real-world bad guy" in a sympathetic press. A generous reading of the story could lead one to think David defeated Goliath - in May 1999, eToys shares stood at slightly more than $85. Two years later, as the toywar came to an end - etoy having seen off eToys - they were worth less than one per cent of that.

The reality, however, is that eToys.com is just one of thousands of Internet start-ups that crashed and burned quite spectacularly following the Internet boom. Voodoo economics, poor management, wasteful spending, bad timing as well as hugely unrealistic expectations contributed significantly more to the collapse of eToys.com than a group of art students.

One refreshing and unusual element of this story is that the boys behind etoy.com could have settled the case early, lined their pockets and moved on, knowing they had lived our (well, my) easy money dream. Having principles can be a costly, if rewarding, business.

Conor Pope is deputy editor of The Irish Times website, ireland.com

Leaving Reality Behind: The Battle for the Soul of the Internet. By Adam Wishart and Regula Boschler. Fourth Estate, 359pp, £16.99 sterling