While the economy is global, politics and political institutions are still, for the most part, local or national. This set of colliding regulatory and business forces creates tremendous complexity for global businesses that must work across a patchwork of fragmented national and regional regulations. In this chapter, the authors examine some of the complexities of this political and economic terrain through two cases. The first case considers the differences in views of the privacy of personal data between the United States and the European Union that have come to the fore in discussions of the Safe Harbor negotiations. The second case examines the challenges in developing a global information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, spearheaded by the US Global Information Infrastructure (GII) initiative. Both of these cases illustrate the challenges of managing global operations in a world of local politics and the importance of deeply held cultural beliefs in shaping the advance of global regulations. They also show that, paradoxically, in a globalizing world, domestic regulations are becoming increasingly important.