| What's in a name? On the web, a good "domain name" -- such as "amazon.com" or "newsday.com" -- is profoundly important, particularly when it's the name of an online retailer. As e-tailing priestcraft dictates, your name must be simple and memorable. It must end with a ".com", the marker of modern commerce. And it must, absolutely must, be unique. You can't be confused with someone else, because the name is how the customer finds you. If they accidentally type in a competitor's name, you're screwed. Companies who find themselves desiring a good .com name will thus wage bloodthirsty legal battles to get it. Such is the recent and surreal case of eToys.com. Two weeks ago, the online toy retailer actually hauled a ragtag group of performance artists into court claiming that their website hurt eToys.com's brand and domain name. The story goes like this: The artists, who live in Europe, produce work that mocks and critiques the modern marketplace. They decided to call their group eToy, and on October 13, 1995, they registered the domain name "etoy.com" . Soon, they'd set up virtual shop, and were producing online parodies of products and corporate blather. Each year, particularly at Christmas, they received tons of hits and admirers. They won awards from arts festivals, including the prestigious Ars Electronica Golden Nica (the winner this year is Linux). And, I should point out, they did this all years before eToys.com -- the toy company -- ever existed. But eToys.com eventually did exist. They registered their domain on Nov. 3, 1997. And by this summer, with e-retailing becoming a juggernaut force, they decided they didn't like eToy.com having such a similar domain name. Things came to a head in August, when an online shopper, looking to buy something from eToys.com, accidentally wound up at eToy.com. Enraged by the use of swear words in the art, he fired off a letter of complaint to eToys.com. eToys.com decided to take etoy.com to court, claiming the site had diluted their brand. The suit seemed laughable, particularly considering the eToy.com artists have been online for two years longer than the toy company. But -- and this is the head-slappingly obvious lesson here -- money talks. Two weeks ago, the toy company convinced a California state court to grant an injunction against eToy.com, preventing them from using the domain until the case is resolved. Facing massive fines if they remained online, eToy.com pulled their site. (More details are available at a fan site, http://www.toywar.com). The lesson here? In the info-age, .coms belong to real companies only, dammit. No artists are allowed -- even if the whole point of their art is to discuss corporate behavior. And as for free speech? Riiiiiiiight. Even viewed through a purely e-commerce lens, the story here is alarming. What the eToys.com debacle illustrates is that quality, service and efficiency simply don’t matter when it comes to online success. Getting your name right is more important. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will make you millions. |

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| ## Welcome to Clive's virtual conference room

| 1) Great article...I for one can't stand corporate america. This whole situation is just typical of the mentality of people today. Whover has the most money wins. E-commerce sucks because in most cases there is no customer service. Sure it's great for real businesses but for strictly .com companies it is almost non-existent. I'm speaking from a personal bad experience with Textbooks.com (don't order from them). With the number of mindless drones that use the internet today, counterculture is fighting a losing battle. |

| By : | Andrew - asmale@engmail.uwaterloo.ca
| Date: | 12/21/99
|  | Re: Toy Wars

| 2) Actually, there is a whole lot of organizing going on right now around the etoy.com story. Since I wrote this column, artmark -- the culture-jamming collective -- have a launched a really big effort aiming at messing up etoys.com, including a FloodNet attack. Interesting stuff. |

| By : | Clive - clive@shift.com
| Date: | 12/20/99
|  | Re: Toy Wars

| 3) Hey I've been following this whole etoy/etoys thing for a little while now, and it pisses me off. Not that that sentiment is uncommon, I'm sure. So, what is to be done? It doesn't do much good to say "don't buy stuff from them", because truth is myself, probably yourself and most of the folks who read your magazine/website are not e-toys' target market: Thirty- or Fourty-something moms and dads. So what do we do? All I can say is that it was the beauty of internet technology is that as soon as someone creates something, someone figures out a way to get around it. Let's put our collective little e-enabled brains together and figure out a way to make e-toys' life miserable. No-one else is going to regulate the internet-- judges, governments, etc. have no idea how to deal with it and would rather it just go away. As this story has shown, they're perfectly happy to just listen to whoever is going to cry loudest (ie, throw the most money around),go back to their burrows and hide. Simply by virtue of the net's sheer size, it must be regulated by and according to the ideals of it's users. Let's find a way to make E-Toys very, very miserable. --Matt. |

| By : | Matt Harper - unite@interchange.ubc.ca
| Date: | 12/20/99
|  | Re: Toy Wars

Clive Thompson is the New York Editor-at-Large for Shift magazine. He is also a columnist for Newsday, and covers culture, politics and technology for several magazines.