I. Introduction
When the Internet surged into public prominence almost a decade ago, some were quick
to proclaim that it – and anything done over it – could not be regulated, at least not by states or
other traditional authorities. “T
he Net,” pioneer John Gilmore famously explained, “interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it.”
A few years later, reality has caught up with early
cyber-libertarian vision. All markets require rules and regulations (Polanyi 1944), and markets
embedded in electronic data networks are no exception. Yet not everything has remained the
same. The transnational character of the data networks underpinning the new markets has led to
severe regulatory interdependence among jurisdictions, forcing states to engage in far-reaching
regulatory cooperation. The surge in international regulatory cooperation, in turn, has been
associated with a marked diversification of the institutional mechanisms through which states
govern transnational markets. Some policy areas feature regulation through international
organizations and treaties, while others witness loose transgovernmental cooperation by
domestic regulatory agencies. Certain issue areas remain under the direct control of public
officials, whereas other aspects of transnational market regulation have been delegated to the
private sector.
How can we account for such “varieties of cooperation” in transnational market
governance? What determines the form of regulatory cooperation in a particular issue area?
This paper’s central thesis is that the organization of domestic market regulation in the largest,
most rigorously regulated market profoundly shapes the trajectory of international regulatory
This paper draws heavily on my forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation, Varieties of Cooperation: Regulating Transnational
Markets for Information Goods. I would like to thank Abe Newman, Sara Watson, Steve Weber and Almudena
Villanueva for very helpful comments on previous drafts.
1
John Gilmore, as quoted in Peter H. Lewis, “Limiting a Medium Without Boundaries: How Do You Let the Good
Fish Through the Net While Blocking the Bad?,” The New York Times, 15 January 1996.
2
Convention