The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard.
There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens.
The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world.
It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development.
A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.