Many reporters have ascribed the responsibility for saving etoy.com either to ®TMark or, more recently, to Toywar.com. Such increasingly wild misreporting
not only slights those who actually did the saving, but leaves a much less empowering tale for those who will fight in the future.
This revised timeline shows how ®TMark
(italics) stepped into the fray a full two weeks after protests began,
and how Toywar.com (bold) became functional fully five weeks after the
start of hostilities--after eToys had been completely defeated, with only one
formality missing. (Areas in the chart are hyperlinked to relevant articles.)
We hope that this timeline helps show that the only important role in the fight against eToys was played by the thousands of activists who, with little or no coordination, flooded eToys investment boards until many dropped stock, bombarded eToys.com until CNN reported the anger, wrote countless e-mails to reporters, eToys employees, and anyone else who might listen, and finally achieved, for etoy and for everyone, one of the most significant victories of humanity over commerce in Internet history.
Most text items are linked to the relevant articles. This chart
was inspired by etoy and RT
Thompson, and is intended for illustrational purposes only, not to imply
a simple causality. There are many factors in the decline of eToys stock, of
which the etoy protests were only some.
