A century ago, Standard Oil New Jersey went overseas in search of oil. In the late 1990s, America Online went around the world in search of subscribers. In 1899, the United Fruit Company needed to be in Central America because of that region's advantages in the cultivation of bananas. Nowadays, Yahoo needs to be everywhere because the more visitors it attracts, the higher its stock price.

While the rules and technologies of the new economy have altered some of the modalities of international business, the primary motives pushing companies abroad remain unchanged. Corporations still expand globally to increase profits or to respond to the competitive moves of their rivals.

In considering where and when to go abroad, companies are also driven by the unique imperatives of their particular industry. Oil and mining firms companies look to geology; consumer goods groups search for big markets; and so on.

But the Internet has also modified some of these long-held truths. Fundamentally, a company no longer needs to go abroad to be abroad. Online brokerages operate globally without ever shipping anything overseas or establishing a physical presence beyond their own country. Moreover, even companies without a foreign presence must now contend with a wide variety of overseas challenges and threats.

So, just as the first US multinationals needed government help in advancing and protecting their interests, their new economy successors need a new kind of commercial diplomacy. Indeed, one of the ironies facing today's nimble, flexible high-technology companies - many of which pride themselves on their libertarian spirit - is that their global success may depend in no small measure on the slow, lumbering process of multilateral negotiations.

In the old days, multinationals had to bear the risk that foreign governments could seize their oil fields or factories. Today, the main risk for many companies is that hackers and counterfeiters will appropriate their intellectual property. Protests from the ambassador are not much use against this kind of threat. Witness the continuing saga of US and Chinese efforts to negotiate and enforce agreements that have done little to beat back a virtual army of copyright pirates.

Companies also face a vastly different antitrust landscape. In the past, threats to the likes of Standard Oil came only from trustbusters in the US Justice Department. Today, as AOL, Time Warner and Microsoft can attest, challenges also emerge from the European Union in Brussels, the World Trade Organisation in Geneva and a host of national jurisdictions. Today's global companies may have as much to fear from the co-operation of national regulators countries as from the collusive practices of rivals.

Finally, new-economy companies must look beyond their own governments to ensure uniform international technological standards. The more standards for Internet and telecommunications vary across borders, the harder it is for companies in these sectors to maximise revenues worldwide.

For all its power and influence, the US has not been able to impose its preferences in these areas, mostly because no government, no matter how powerful, can attempt unilaterally to impose or enforce its will on these issues. Instead, the challenges can be met only through what perhaps is the slowest, most inefficient way of solving human problems: multilateralism. Technology companies favour speed, decentralisation, individualism and a disregard for geography, borders and sovereignty. Multilateralism normally involves slow decision-making, unclear goals and hypersensitivity about erosion of sovereignty.

Innovations in how countries organise to define and collectively enforce the rules that govern the new economy will be as critical in determining its evolution as the technological innovations that drive it.

The author is the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine: www.foreignpolicy.com