The International Telecommunication Union's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis is over. The U.S. is claiming a momentary victory because ICANN, the Internet Assigned Names Corporation based in Southern California, was not hijacked by either the ITU or WSIS delegates seeking to put their stamp on the engine of global telecommunications. The U.S. victory, however, will be short lived, for what we saw in Tunis and elsewhere in the U.N. and UNESCO is just the beginning of a new era in world communications policy and regulation.

For the last 30 years or so, the United States has been variously accused of cultural imperialism, electronic colonialism or information apartheid, and has been presented with a myriad of obstacles from national content restrictions, trade embargos on software, music and films and even so-called privacy protection schemes -- intended to reverse the flow of communication around the world -- to a 20-year effort by UNESCO to create a new treaty calling for a "free but balanced flow" of communications, goods and services.

Each time, the U.S. has managed to overcome such proposed barriers to the free flow of communications. Today, thanks to satellite technology and e-commerce, capitalism is clearly in triumph the world over. Most countries in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and in the southern hemisphere have permitted some form of commercial television. They have also deregulated their telephone and broadcast monopolies permitting some form of foreign investment and generally promoting international communications, all of which in turn have ushered in the new era of globalization.

Private-sector companies have made investments all over the world and now operate somewhat seamlessly producing global goods and services for worldwide consumption. Indeed, the difficulty for many governments is that the global corporations they expect to regulate or otherwise control are much larger than most governments. However, the corporations themselves are somewhat stateless and as a result national governments are losing their ability to control much of what happens within their jurisdictions. This has heightened the level of concern and frustration.

Now that broadcasting, cable and telephony have converged, and the economy is truly global, countries are awakening to the fact that there are no national economies anymore, but rather, as Kenichi Ohmae has put it "only a global economy" which no one is in charge of. Consequently, national political leaders are looking for ways to rein in the power and influence of global telecom and media providers as they promote their own Internet-based economy and play an increasingly larger role in shaping the policies of international organizations like the ITU and UNESCO.

The fight over ICANN at Tunis was only the beginning of that effort. It was in some ways perverse that the Internet, which is a product of our global age, cannot truly be regulated in the usual way and that regulators and policymakers are looking for some way to harness its growth and development. It is not surprising therefore that the idea of forming a special international agency to regulate ICANN has failed. But the desire to have a say in the development of global telecommunications policy and the development of our Internet world remains alive and well among international agencies, academics and policy makers. UNESCO is a prime example.

Just two months ago, UNESCO pushed a treaty promoting cultural diversity to a vote, leaving the U.S. standing alone opposing the convention, which most countries believed offered an antidote to cultural homogeneity. The U.S. however -- primarily goaded by the Motion Picture Association of America -- believed the convention would allow governments to control culture, and even provide the intellectual framework for a new era of censorship to block the flow of foreign films and other information products and services.

UNESCO, in preparation for the Tunis meeting, released a 150-page treatise