Even as excitement over Web 2.0 draws a new bunch of entrepreneurial prospectors, it’s becoming clear that the Internet’s Wild West days are ending. Governments are moving in, looking to exert more control over what has become a critical infrastructure for commerce and communication – and thus a central concern for bureaucrats. A consortium of U.S. states is making a new push to tax Internet sales. The European Commission, worried about ceding control over the continent’s cultural heritage to U.S. search giants like Google and Yahoo, has announced plans to create its own massive digital library. The FCC is demanding that VoIP providers give the FBI and other law enforcement agencies a means to wiretap conversations running over their networks (eBay should have fun explaining that to Skype’s European subscribers). Google is hiring Washington lobbyists to, as it nervously puts it, “defend the Internet as a free and open platform for information, communication, and innovation.”

More broadly, the world’s support for continued U.S. control over Internet rule-making appears to be falling apart. Authoritarian states like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran have always been uncomfortable with the Internet’s openness, and they’ve grown more aggressive in demanding that states be given greater control over Internet governance. They are looking, in particular, to take over some of the power traditionally wielded by Icann, the California-based nonprofit organization operated under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce, over the management of top-level domain names and other technical standards. Governments unfriendly toward the U.S. are also calling for changes in Internet governance, with Brazil even threatening that it will carve out its own regional Internet if the current system isn’t changed.

Their cause received a major boost last month when the European Union came out in favor of greater international oversight over the Internet, calling for “the establishment of an arbitration and dispute resolution mechanism based on international law in case of disputes.” The U.S. is steadfast in its opposition to the European proposal. A bipartisan group of congressmen, for instance, issued a letter arguing that “the Bush Administration, and specifically the Department of Commerce, should continue to maintain strong oversight so that Icann maintains its focus and meets it core technical mission.” The IT industry, too, is defending the status quo. The issue should come to a head next month when the World Summit of the Information Society is held in Tunisia.

Whatever happens in Tunisia, governments’ interest in controlling the Internet will only increase. Thanks to the Net, the world’s computing and communications assets are becoming ever more portable; data storage and processing can increasingly be done anywhere, regardless of national boundaries. It’s becoming possible, in other words, for essential components of a country’s economic infrastructure to be operated on foreign shores, under the control of foreign governments. The implications of this fact, not just for commerce but for national security, are far-reaching – and governments have yet to grapple with them. But, inevitably, they’ll be forced to grapple with them. Nations don’t tend to like giving control over their economic destinies to other nations.

It would be nice to think that, when it comes to digital communications and commerce, countries will simply trust one another – nice, but not particularly realistic. The next Cold War will likely be fought on the Internet.