Sega Headquarters in Tokyo.
Morning light shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows into the Managing Director's Office.
Nakayama Takuya put the freshly organized progress chart for the Sotsu acquisition into a drawer.
The encrypted dedicated-line telephone on the desk rang.
He pressed the answer button. A faint electric hiss came through the line, followed by the operator tone from North America.
"Boss, Tom's here too." Frank's voice came through.
"It's five in the afternoon in California." Nakayama Takuya glanced at the world clock on the wall. "What urgent matter requires a transoceanic conference call?"
"It's about Steve Case and his AOL." Frank got straight to the point. "We've discovered some interesting little moves in AOL's backyard."
Tom Kalinske's voice cut in after him. "To be precise, a soft blockade aimed at Silicon Valley Online."
Nakayama Takuya leaned back in his chair without interrupting, waiting for the rest.
Frank began recounting how it had started.
"The afternoon before yesterday, a supervisor in our Administrative Department was complaining in the break room. She's been an AOL subscriber for five years.
"She found that for more than half a month now, there hasn't been a single report about Dungeons & Dragons Online in the news feed or entertainment section on AOL's homepage. During the Olympic Games, AOL's sports section also deliberately avoided all data and page links that cited go.com."
"An everyday complaint from a nontechnical employee." Frank paused. "But I had the technical department run a full test. We registered fifty brand-new AOL accounts and simulated user behavior across different profiles."
"How did it turn out?" Nakayama Takuya asked.
"They did it very cleanly," Frank replied. "AOL hasn't directly blocked our IP at the physical level. As long as users type go.com into their address bar, they can still access it normally. But