ABSTRACT
Transnational private governance (TPG) has become a prominent phenomenon in the history of cyberspace. The growth of the Internet and of electronic commerce has been successfully managed and promoted by various forms of TPG. But, the resulting patterns of power and order also show the limits of private actors in governing social relations at the transnational level. The analysis of such patterns will illustrate how important the role played by private authorities has been in the control of electronic markets in the Internet. The power of private actors in this domain has clearly exceeded the power of public authorities, and very often such power has been backed by some legitimacy, by some acknowledgement that those private actors were authorised to exercise it. When power is vested with authority and when it is exercised by private authorities, then it is an act of private authority (Strange 1996; Cutler 1999). In electronic markets, private authorities have been decisive in the emergence of an e-commerce regime.
