Leaving Reality Behind: The battle for the soul of the Internet by Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler, Fourth Estate, £16.99, ISBN 1841155934
IT STARTED as a mundane, if obnoxious, dispute over website names. The American e-commerce company eToys, owned by millionaires grown fat and arrogant on the 1999 stock market, won a court decision to close down a website called etoy.com—on the basis that it was “cybersquatting” the eToys brand name. Never mind that the German artists’ collective was online long before the corporation was thought of.
The etoy/eToys case happened at a key moment in the evolution of…
