In a last savory anecdote culled from 10 hours of interviews with Thomas Penfield Jackson, the federal judge who ruled against Microsoft in the most expensive antitrust suit in history, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta relays a telling half-joke. Assuming his familiar role as disciplinarian to a petulant child, Jackson suggests that a good remedy for CEO Bill Gates would be to review the latest Napoleon biography, just to get a sense of his own arrogance and hubris. But in the end—and with many appeals battles still to be waged, an end is not in sight—Jackson's comments may wind up revealing more about his own position than Microsoft's, adding one more piece of evidence that the judge had it in for the company from the start. An exhaustively thorough account of the trial and its ramifications, much of it culled from the original essays Auletta wrote for The New Yorker, World War 3.0 thrives on this kind of inside scoop. Without the author's unrivaled access to all the key players, there would be little to distinguish War from the media fray, especially the ubiquitous coverage of online sources such as Salon and Slate. Even as is, it's hard to avoid glazing over during the book's detailed, blow-by-blow recap of the trial, which at times is as gripping as the minutes of a local zoning-board meeting. War opens with Auletta's personal run-in with Gates at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January 1998, just as the U.S. Justice Department was preparing its case against Microsoft's alleged monopolistic practices. Dogged by charges that he violated a truce with the government by installing an Internet browser in his Windows software (a move that threatened to crush competitors such as Netscape), Gates publicly harangued the author for moderating a panel heavily biased against Microsoft. Complementing Judge Jackson's constant chiding of Gates for his arrogance and petty bullying, this prologue underlines what may be the trial's chief lesson: For Gates and Microsoft, their punishing defeat may be as much a public-relations disaster as a legal one. (The recent film Antitrust, for example, buys into Gates' villainy so thoroughly that his avatar practically bites the heads off of live open-source programmers.) But, like a good reporter, Auletta settles for an evenhanded and refreshingly pragmatic view of the case, refusing to color either side in an especially negative light. If anyone in the story emerges as a hero, it's David Boies, the ace government prosecutor who used internal documents and e-mails to roast one company witness after another. In the last big government antitrust suit, Boies was on the other side of the aisle, representing IBM; like a hired gunslinger, he has no true allegiances. But with the uncertainties of new technologies, which challenge the courts' abilities to fully understand the issues, let alone judge them (significantly, both Jackson and Boies are Luddites), it doesn't pay to be a hard-liner in either camp.