At 11.30am on June 1 2005, three British expatriates were detained by the police in Tanzania. Cliff Stone, Michael Livermore and Roger Harrington were the senior managers at City Water, a consortium responsible for managing Dar es Salaam's water supply. After being held for several hours, the men were served with notices describing them as "undesirable immigrants" and told to leave the country.

City Water repeatedly complained to the Tanzanian water ministry that its bid was based on flawed information supplied by Dawasa. According to a subsequent World Bank report, signed by the bank's then-president, Paul Wolfowitz, City Water stopped paying its monthly fee for leasing Dawasa's piping and other infrastructure in July 2004, less than a year into the contract. The company was also insisting that its operating fee be raised.

Asked by Dawasa to assess if this was justified, auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers and the British engineering consultants Howard Humphreys rejected City Water's arguments. (Biwater, for its part, directs blame at Dar es Salaam's water authority, saying that Dawasa had "barely started" big capital-works projects on which rehabilitation of the system depended.)

Due to financial and technological reasons, water undertakings are often being conducted by large scale Multi National Corporations (MNC). Governments often positioned Regional Authorities as a regulator to these MNCs, and at the same time engaged in water contracts with them through State Owned Enterprise (SOE).

However, the relationship between Water MNC and Governments is asymmetrical as MNCs can move their assets overnight, transfer their ownership to third parties, seek various means of redress through bilateral, regional or international investment treaties and avoid confiscation by reallocating their assets. These are often done by hiding behind multiple jurisdictions enjoyed either by their parent companies, subsidiaries or shareholders.

The positions of Governments are the opposite as they do not have the flexibilities enjoyed by MNCs. This paper attempts to prescribe issues that need to be highlighted in safeguarding water contracts in Indonesia.

The first part discusses the legal relationship between institutions involved in a water undertaking. The second part listed down regulatory mechanisms in Indonesian context, more specific towards the impact of Constitutional Court’s review of the Water Law (2004). The third part of the paper examines the provisions existing normally in water contracts between a local subsidiary of MNC and regional authorities and presents a point of view in drafting the clauses.

Linden presents the TOS on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A potential participant can either click “assent” to the TOS, and then gain entrance to Second Life’s virtual world, or refuse assent and be denied access. Linden also clearly has superior bargaining strength over Bragg. Although Bragg is an experienced attorney, who believes he is expert enough to comment on numerous industry standards and the ‘rights’ or participants in virtual worlds, … he was never presented with an opportunity to use his experience and lawyering skills to negotiate terms different from the TOS that Linden offered.

Before signing the PSC (or KKS as it is now called), the investor built an economic model, calculating his return on investment using several scenarios. He negotiated a contract expecting a certain minimum net result. If this expected net result no longer holds true because the deal was unilaterally changed, or if he is, for example, subject to sudden spurious tax levies at the central and local levels, he will demand that his economic expectations under the agreed contract be restored. If he does not get that, he may pack his bags and leave, and/or resort to arbitration.

Admittedly, there will always be a need for some degree of regulation, especially in the event of what economists call market failures. But the government should step in only when it needs to fix something. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That is the prevailing management theory and a fundamental credo of microeconomics.

Free speech and fair use don't mean much if software end user license agreements, or EULAs, or website terms of service, or TOS, can take those rights away. Contract law allows private parties to agree to forgo most rights in exchange for some privilege. Vendors of goods and services take advantage of modern contracting tools, like click-through or shrink-wrap, to impose terms and conditions on using software or websites. These documents purport to limit the user's legal rights.

Two things have changed. First, it's no longer acceptable only to catch criminals during or after a crime has been committed. Counter-terrorism requires identifying and neutralizing threats ahead of time. Second, collecting information about everyone is now much cheaper and easier than it used to be. We spread information about ourselves as we use the internet, shop online, talk on our cell phones, send e-mail or use electricity. These activities leave a digital trail that database and search technology can store and access relatively inexpensively.

Last month at the ACS national meeting in San Diego, Vicki Colvin, director of the Center for Biological & Environmental Nanotechnology and chemistry professor at Rice University, told a standing-room-only crowd about a project she’s spearheaded to create a dictionary for the nanoscale. Colvin hopes that by developing standard terminology for nanomaterials, she and her colleagues will be able to create a common language that helps scientists and nonscientists alike.