Global E-Commerce Regulation - Jurisdiction

JURISDICTION

Many Internet pioneers hoped to keep the medium more or less free from government controls. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that he heads, were committed to keeping the Web as open as possible, allowing for the widest range of input and choices. The standards and protocols they sponsored had a tremendous impact toward this end, but the group was a private nonprofit organization, not a government regulatory body. The W3C worked with business leaders, citizen groups, and others to reach a wide consensus, and drew praise for this laid-back and cooperative approach.

As the Internet proliferated further around the globe, many saw a need for a single body that could act as a global regulator of one sort or another. The nature of such a regulatory body, however, was much disputed. Questions abounded over how much power it should or could have, how it should enforce regulations, and how it would be structured. Some proposed that either the W3C or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) take on a broader regulatory function, but as of the early 2000s it seemed unlikely that either organization could or would assume such a role. Other likely prospects included more established government forums such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), but critics warned that these bodies lacked the kind of openness, accountability, and consensus-based decision-making that would be required to negotiate competing global interests.