Chapter I provides a brief overview of the history of the international standardizing system and the bodies under study in this book (the ASTM, Codex, the FSC, the IEC, ISO, the UNECE Working Party of Agricultural Standards), along with a deeper scrutiny of the membership, governance, development of standards and the rules of procedure of the latter. It shows how most of the bodies under study, with the exception of those belonging to the UN, started as bottom-up spontaneous private efforts to address perceived needs to which the governments or traditional IGOs were not attending. When these bodies were created, with the exception of the FSC, the world was a much simpler one, standardization only concerning a few actors, most of them located in "advanced nations"; participation in IGOs and the development of international law was a prerogative exclusively of states. Most importantly, these bodies developed voluntary standards and neither their structures nor their rules were prepared for the task that the WTO entrusted to them: becoming the world regulators. Over time and trying to cope with this new responsibility and the challenges posed by globalization, these bodies have made changes to their structures and rules. They have created new bodies and implemented new policies.