Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace

Adam Wishart

Nowadays, all the biggest and best websites have their own biography. Last year saw the publication of The Google Story and before that The Perfect Store; the story of eBay. As I understand it, there are at least two books about the making of Amazon. Then there are the failures, like boo.com, whose spectacular rise and fall was documented in classy fashion in Boo Hoo. Leaving Reality Behind belongs, partly, in the latter category. It's the story of a dotcom disaster but it's also a book about defiance as an art form.

Let's start with etoy.com. The domain name was claimed in 1995 by a group of underground Swiss artists who call themselves etoy. Their chief intention was was to create an absurdist critique of coporate culture. A few months later, in distant California, with ecommerce just beginning to get interesting, a couple of Californian entrepreneurs founded eToys.com with the goal of becoming the Amazon of the toy industry.

The etoy project was interesting and ambitous but at times also juvenile. Their "art", as it is described by Wishart was pretty feeble, it seems to me and a large part of the middle of the book describes their squabbles. In the early days, the people who started eToys.com weren't so different. They were also the new kids on the block, impishly aiming to gun down the giant toys-r-us. Naturally they were more business-minded than the etoy group but they were just as spirited and charismatic. Like etoy, they worked long hours and thought they were going to change the world.

But in 1999 eToys.com was one of those startups which was able to ride the dotcom wave and rapidly became a business colossus. At the time of their IPO eToys.com was valued at $8.65 billion. The head count at eToys.com ballooned to over a thousand. It doesn't need this book's author to point out that Leaving Reality Behind (which was etoy's slogan at the time) applied equally well to the mad scramble for eToys stock.

It's at this point that etoy and eToys.com clashed properly for the first time (a half-hearted attempt to purchase the etoy.com domain a couple of years earlier had simply been ignored by the artists). In September 1999 eToys.com lodged a substantive complaint - running to hundreds of pages - in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

In describing the arsenal of top-grade lawyers that the billion dollar startup was able to employ against its opponent Wishart reminds the reader that eToys was by this stage no longer a punk startup but a hugely powerful corporation. And suddenly, after the book's slowish start and 200 pages of etoy's annoying stunts, we're all on the side of the little guy. As well as launching a full scale legal assault eToys.com also offered the boys $160,000 to surrender the domain name: an offer which was coolly rejected. The arrogance of the Americans simply served to stiffen the defiance of the etoy group.

In the end growing operational difficulties and the slide in its share price forced eToys to think again and give up the battle. Soon after, along with many other dotcoms, its massive valuation was exposed as baseless and the overnight ecommerce giant went out of business. The etoy artists continue to thrive.

A fun read and a roller-coater ride.