Filled with fascinating glimpses behind today's financial headlines, Underwriting the Internet is a fast-paced story of one of the most exciting developments that has ever occurred. This comprehensive treatment of the technical advances, financial engineering, and entrepreneurial genius behind the Internet revolution includes actual corporate case studies, stock market analyses, and synopses of regulatory investigations. While focusing on the Internet's commercial development, the author describes the little understood technical and financial areas of the Internet revolution. He shows how the industry set off an investment frenzy built on biased financial research, executive malfeasance, and lax oversight by corporate directors and government agencies that ultimately destroyed the majority of dot-com startups as well as countless investment portfolios across America. Hiraoka analyzes specific events and corporate alliances that contributed to the Internet's development, and compares the startup companies that began operating with questionable business plans that inevitably failed. He covers the anti-trust case against Microsoft; the successes of eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google; "road-kills" along the information highway such as the forgotten eToys; as well as the Enron implosion and other corporate scandals. After tracing this amazing story he concludes that the illegal practices and the ensuing $7 trillion loss in equity markets slowed the Internet revolution but could not snuff it out, and with worldwide economic recovery e-business surges onward.
