The problem is, he said, that what is anticompetitive in one region may not be in another region. The DOJ has called for a Global Competition Initiative, bringing in various international regulatory bodies to form a working group to discuss how antitrust reviews can be coordinated. Such cooperation will have to overcome deep suspicion. The arena for international policy and legal debate isn't confined to antitrust review. A main issue is that VAT is keyed to a point of purcchase, which is difficult to establish in cyberspace.
Technical standards raise another source of international tension.
The UMTS standard is based on W-CDMA, a technology developed by NTT DoCoMo of Japan. But it's hard to argue with success, and Europeans point to greater mobile phone penetration in the EU and interoperability of mobile phones throughout the region as a result of an early decision to adopt a single standard. For Anil Kripalani, Qualcomm's senior vice president of technology marketing, the lesson is that it's hard to separate the technical from social and economic issues. The Internet and the improved telecommunications infrastructure in the country has enabled us to offer these services from India. The Europeanwide company allows Web shoppers to exercise collective buying power.