Companies who try to take control
As well as the supragovernment organisations which we have reviewed above, it can be argued that companies seek control of the Internet to gain competitive advantage. For example, Microsoft used what have been judged as anti-competitive tactics to gain a large market share for its browser, Internet Explorer. In a five year period, it has achieved over 75% market share, which has given it advantages in other areas of e-commerce such as advertising revenue through its portal MSN (www.msn.com) and retail, through its sites such as travel site Expedia (www.expedia.com). Microsoft has also sought to control standards such as HTML and has introduced rival standards or variants of other standards (for example VBScript rather than JavaScript and C# rather than Java). The control exerted by Microsoft is criticised by many and has been found to be anti-competitive in law.
It could be argued that commercial pressure enable rapid development of practical solutions, examples include Javascript and Cookies (Netscape), Active Server Pages (Microsoft) and Java (Sun Microsystems).