intellectual property, in contrast, meant that projection of regulatory authority required the prior
construction of a domestic coordination mechanism. USTR and the trade policy apparatus
supplied such a mechanism, leading to regulatory cooperation in the interstate mode that was
eventually codified in TRIPs and awarded the WTO a key role. The evolution of the private
international regime for domain names, finally, broadly supports the hypothesized relationship
between domestic market regulation and varieties of cooperation. Prior to the Internet’s
commercialization, regulatory authority in the U.S. was centralized in the private sector –
officially with IANA but actually in Jon Postel’s hands. His delegation practices ensured that
authority abroad was similarly in private hands, resulting in a transnational network of
“responsible persons.” The rise of a transnational market for domain names threw the
arrangement into disarray. Regulatory authority in the U.S. diffused as an increasing number of
actors claimed to have authority over the domain name system. Constructing an international
regulatory regime without a mechanism to coordinate these diverse actors proved impossible,
consistent with the model’s expectations. Once the U.S. government had assumed responsibility,
a variety of possibilities existed. Rather than delegating authority to a new independent
regulatory agency or permanently bundling up domain name regulation with a host of other e-
commerce issues that might require broad international negotiations, the U.S. government
redelegated authority to the private sector, setting the industry on a new trajectory of regulatory
cooperation in the transnational mode. However, the incompleteness of redelegation lets
uncertainty and contestation prevail within the regime.
Market share in transnational markets is clearly an important determinant of power in
international regulatory bargaining. Yet market power alone is insufficient. In the case of
intellectual property, for example, the U.S. only began to exert significant influence over foreign
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Convention