In October 1999, potential new entrants to the United Kingdom mobile market secured a significant victory as a result of the Court of Appeal's ruling in Mercury Personal Communications Ltd (A Firm Trading as One2One)(Respondent) v. Secretary of State for the Department of Trade & Industry (Appellant). A full copy of the decision may be located at the on-line subscription service http://www.lawtel.co.uk. The Court of Appeal overturned the High Court's earlier decision upholding One2One's claim that the United Kingdom Government was acting unlawfully by requiring existing mobile network operators, as a pre-condition for participation in the upcoming auction for third-generation ("3G") spectrum licences, to allow new entrants to "roam" on to the existing networks while rolling out their networks. Under the Court of Appeal's judgment, the United Kingdom Government is now entitled to require that all existing operators (including Vodafone, BT Cellnet and Orange) provide "roaming" services to new entrants, subject to the requirements of the Roaming Condition as proposed by the Director General of Telecommunications ("DGT"). The decision is significant to the United Kingdom Government who had been forced to delay the 3G spectrum auction (now scheduled for February 21,2000) pending the Court of Appeal's decision, given that many potential new entrants struggled to create a business case for the construction of a 3G network without roaming.

On 1 August 2008, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a controversial order against Comcast, a cable network operator and content distributor and the second largest provider of broadband internet access in the United States, finding it had violated the FCCs policy of "network neutralit" by deliberately interfering with the ability of its customers to use BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications which permit the sharing of video and other large data files. Network neutrality is a concept with many variations, but which has generally come to mean that broadband access providers must ensure that their subscribers are free, of their own choosing, to access internet content and services, run related applications and connect devices to the internet. Regardless of the merits of the FCC's network neutrality policy, which are themselves debatable, the basis of the 3:2 decision of the FCC commissioners rests on untested and questionable legal ground. The order also has a number of evidentiary weaknesses and raises broader policy issues concerning internet regulation, the latter of which are of interest to Australian policymakers as the government considers the appropriate regulatory framework for the national broadband network.

The concept of self-regulation in all of its forms has become a foundation stone in the theoretical and practical debates about the role and function of the modern 'decentred' regulatory state. In the decentred state, government, among other things, ceases to rely upon the old tool of 'command and control' regulation to achieve social policy goals. Instead, government relies on alternative systems developed by industry and others and faces the arguably more daunting challenge of trying to harness the internal regulatory capacity of these other regulatory systems, directing and steering them in a way that ensures they deliver the goods and services sought by society in accordance with accepted social values. Although the focus of the theoretical regulatory debate has started to shift to the meta-regulatory potential of law and the ability of government to 'regulate self-regulation', the question of how and why self-regulatory rule-making regimes actually emerge remains largely unexplored from an empirical standpoint. A better understanding of why self-regulatory rule-making regimes develop and the roles of law and government (if any) in the emergence of those systems is necessary, however, if meta-regulating law is to have any hope of becoming more effective than the blunt instrument of the old-styled regulation of the centred state.