Only a couple years ago various analysts were hailing the arrival of a radically new economy fueled by the expansion of information technology and focused on the Internet. New Internet-based businesses were coming to life every day, attracting some of the best human capital available – both new MBA's fresh out of school and seasoned managers from management consulting firms and the so-called “old-economy” companies. Since in the very short run the supply of talent is fixed, salaries for these talented individuals skyrocketed under the influence of this explosion in demand. A few of the established companies and management consulting firms even set up so-called e-business incubators in an attempt to stop the exodus of talent. They also invested in the development of these e-businesses with the hope of getting a share of returns that were expected to be phenomenal. Furthermore, financial capital flowed to e-business not only directly through these incubators but also from many venture capital firms and private investors.

Does traditional antitrust law tally with the special sphere of the New Economy, and especially with phenomena connected with the Internet? This issue is a disputed one. Whereas the predominant opinion among the antitrust authorities and experts in antitrust law is that antitrust law provisions and principles of application are generally sufficient in order to assess the new phenomena adequately, there are also those who refer to the specific nature of the Internet economy and call for restraint when applying antitrust law provisions in this sphere. In order to resolve this disputed issue it is important to keep in mind the numerous problems in the border zone between antitrust law and the Internet. For example, one argument occasionally submitted is that the Internet medium facilitates inadmissible concerted action. In these cases it is considered very difficult to bring the offenders to justice. These fears are open to doubt. The Microsoft proceedings have shown that statements made on the Internet or within an intranet are stored in numerous places and are easier to trace than would be the case if an informal meeting were held. However, practical experience is still lacking with Internet-based hard-core cartels. At the conference of the US Federal Trade Commission in May 2001, one of the focal themes was price fixing on the Internet.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the liability of multi-national corporations for the acts or defaults of their subsidiaries. Most frequently a corporation engaged in multi-national activities will operate in various countries through local subsidiaries incorporated there. Liability may be incurred because of hazards associated with the mining or manufacturing operations or the goods distributed through the subsidiary may cause harm to consumers or users. The subsidiary is clearly primarily responsible for its own acts or defaults. The question is: when can liability for such acts or defaults be sheeted home to the parent corporation?

We examine changes in the stock trading behavior and investment performance of 1,607 investors who switch from phone based to online trading during the period 1992 to 1995. We document that young men who are active traders with high incomes and a preference for investing in small growth stocks with high market risk are more likely to switch to online trading. We also find that those who switch to online trading experience unusually strong performance prior to going online, beating the market by more than two percent annually. After going online, they trade more actively, more speculatively, and less profitably than before – lagging the market by more than three percent annually. A rational response to reductions in market frictions (lower trading costs, improved execution speed, and greater ease of access) does not explain these findings. The increase in trading and reduction in performance of online investors can be explained by over confidence augmented by self-attribution bias, information-based overconfidence, and the illusion of control.

In the emerging 21st Century the Internet has become an all-encompassing part of our lives. At least a third of all people in Germany and the UK have access to the Internet. In the US estimates go up to 50%. No successful company may safely ignore the web; “e-commerce” is everywhere. The Internet required many changes to the various legal systems, in private, criminal and public law. While some of these changes happened fast and drastically, certain areas have only carefully been adapted. Among these slowly evolving parts is the law of corporations. Therefore, even though business contacts are already made online, it is still common practice to base shareholder communications and the filing of information with public registers on paper.

The Hague Conference on private international law has been negotiating for some time a draft Convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters. The draft Convention, otherwise known as the Judgments Project, is intended to create common jurisdictional rules for international civil and commercial cases and to provide for the recognition and enforcement of judgments issued by foreign courts under these rules. When discussions began on this Convention, e-commerce was not a consideration as it was not yet a reality. Since then, however, the importance of e-commerce within the context of the Convention has become all too obvious. In recent months, lawyers have gone so far as to tout the Judgments Project as “the most important legal event in the history of cyberspace”. A recent New York Times article even quoted a law school professor as saying that the Convention is “likely to shape the future of international e-commerce”. Some have seised upon the Project as an opportunity to create an international legal framework for the Internet, yet recent negotiations have proved this to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Interestingly, this is not an isolated occurrence. Other intergovernmental organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) have also had difficulty negotiating international instruments with regard to the Internet, especially relating to the harmonisation of private international law rules. This article discusses the importance of building international co-operation for the development of e-commerce and examines the Internet related problems encountered in the Judgments Project, in an attempt to shed light on why it is so difficult to negotiate such co-operation. This article takes stock of the difficult policy decisions that must be made by States in order to push forward and concludes with some thoughts on how States and intergovernmental organisations might move ahead in obtaining greater international co-operation within regard to the Internet.

It seems almost a truism to say that the Internet has changed the world. One can hardly find one area of economic life not strongly influenced by today's flow of information. Important aspects of people's lives have become dependent on a binary language manifested in bits and bytes. Furthermore, this new order is certainly not limited to business or economy. In fact, it applies to the whole issue of globalisation, such as the emerging of new political movements based on networks.

It is a trite statement that the global investment markets have been transformed by the internet. The proliferation of on-line share broking services, the migration of investment transactions from proprietary electronic networks to the open architecture of the internet, the use of the internet to by-pass traditional “bricks and mortar” financial intermediaries, the creation of on-line markets for exotic commodities such as bandwidth and new types of derivatives such as credit and weather derivatives, and the electronic “day trader” phenomenon have all been widely publicised.