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Deals are off, he says. “There is no way in hell I’ll let these guys get away with some sort of cheap deal where they think they can buy their way out of this embarrassment. What they have done here is really bad and everyone has to understand I want to clear my name and I want to beat these guys in court. Ultimately, one day, I want to have some reimbursement for the destruction of this company.”

Dotcom was never going to go quietly.

There are many different Kim Dotcoms. He is the BFG — the Big Fat German or the Big Friendly Giant, depending on which side of the argument people find themselves. He is computer gamer, faker, father, hacker, husband, international criminal and internet visionary. It depends who you ask.

This is not really a book about Dotcom, although there is a lot of Dotcom in it. It is a book about the way honest and open democracies are meant to work.

It is about the unfolding of the Cyber War. The internet is no longer simply a network of computers — it is territory. It is a shadow land which spans the Earth, a means by which citizens of the planet can roam free and interact for business or pleasure, crime or perversion. It is a territory in which commerce occurs and money ebbs back and forth between people, companies and countries criss-crossing a slew of jurisdictions. The universe of the internet has no single law or set of laws which govern it.

So, in this the wild frontier of cyber space, the US is making a land grab and attempting to instill some order.

The Cyber War is being fought on many fronts. There are hackers and developing cadres of cyber-warriors fighting code battles and flame wars, flinging scripts in the way soldiers of the past would put down covering fire. There is the propaganda front, in which intelligence contractors build false social media profiles to win the war of words online. Their opponents — cyber cafes in foreign lands filled with the angry and impassioned. There is the legal war — fought by those like Neil MacBride, the US Attorney prosecuting the Megaupload case, along with other international cases including that of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Along with the code war and the propaganda fronts, there is the diplomatic war. Through this, the US exerts its presence around the world, extending its borders and the jurisdiction of its courts across the internet. It is the demarcation of territory on the internet.

The diplomatic force creates coalitions of nations. New Zealand is being drawn into such a coalition. As the end of 2013 neared, talks were coming to a close on the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations — a trade deal involving Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam — and the United

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