ABSTRACT
The electronic communications sector has made both a significant direct and enabling contribution to the internationalisation of economic activity for over a century. Within the last 30 years, rapid advancements in communications technologies and services coincided with the most recent phase of economic globalisation and in the process have played a significant role in it. One of the outstanding breakthroughs here has been the Internet, whose underlying logic of global communications seamlessness led quickly to expectations of a new, ungovernable (and thus ungoverned) ‘virtual’ economic landscape which could transcend traditional barriers to free international trade. However, the strategic international political-economic significance of the Internet quickly motivated first-mover nation states to attempt to create an international Internet governance framework, in the hope of securing a stake in the emerging Internet economy.
