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Whereas in earlier times, it was left to National Parliaments to balance economic freedoms and protecting colliding values, in today's era of globalization, nation states face serious problems in maintaining domestic levels of protection. Instead of giving in to the constraints of international competition or of engaging in a hopeless battle to reinforce national standards of protection, the only option seems to consist of raising the level of protection from the nation state to a higher, supranational or even global level of regulation. Since the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001, trade lawyers and diplomats have also come to accept the necessity of reconciling free trade and intellectual property rights with the public interest, human rights, the interests of workers and consumers, the protection of the environment, and healthcare as well as the importance of involving developing countries in sustainable development. This paper looks for new approaches to such regulation by building on general concepts of diffuse interests and public goods, and proposes a kind of mixed regulation of balanced interests. In a first analytical step, the paper defines the notions of diffuse interests and public goods and looks at the changing environment of their protection caused by the process of globalization. With regard to the diffuse interests of consumers, WTO rules prove to be clearly deficient, for three reasons: 1) The protection of trade interests under WTO rules fails to protect competitive structures in increasingly global markets; 2) WTO rules focus on the protection of trade interests and at the same time underestimates consumer interests in the provision of high-quality and healthy products; and 3) The existing system does not respond to the problem of insufficient access by poor consumers in the developing world to essential, often indispensable and life-saving products. Whereas the notion of diffuse interests stems from theories of consumer protection, the economic theory of public goods, in particular in the form of a global public goods theory, directly addresses current criticisms of WTO rules. This paper looks critically first at laws protecting intellectual property as an instrument for solving the public goods problem by internalizing the costs of production. Second, it considers international competition as a global public good as well as the capacity of such competition to guarantee the provision of other public goods. WTO rules largely favor the interests of traders over those of consumers and neglects the need for the provision of public goods. Since consumers in the developing world have to rely on the provision of public goods, which may be bought by rich consumers as private goods (e.g., clean water, education, healthcare, etc.), WTO rules also broaden the social gap between richer and poorer countries. To solve the problems of protecting diffuse interests and public goods on a global level, the analysis then looks at traditional approaches by international law. However, even when developed into international economic law that harmonies different fields of economic regulation, traditional approaches to negotiating new fields of regulation on a WTO level on the basis of mutual advantage, as was the case for the TRIPs Agreement, do not guarantee adequate consideration of the need to protect the diffuse interests of consumers or of public goods. Therefore, a solution must be sought via constitutional approaches to international economic regulation, possibly by claiming the establishment of international policies, as has become evident from existing European Community law, with its procedural guarantees of the adequate representation of individuals. Since, however, such form of supranational integration does not seem politically acceptable, less ambitious approaches should be considered. In light of the incompleteness of the WTO Constitution, in particular with regard to the diffuse interests of consumers and of public goods, the paper supports the rejection by the European Court of Justice of a constitutional interpretation of WTO rules, which, as a matter of international law, would guarantee individual rights by making WTO rules directly applicable. Instead, the paper argues in favor of concluding additional agreements for specific fields, such as the protection of genetic resources and international competition. In other fields, national sovereignty should be preserved. To this extent, the paper advocates a system of mixed regulation of balanced interests. The major challenge in such a system consists in solving conflicts between international rules on the one hand, and in particular WTO rules, and national rules on the other. To this end, alternative solutions have to be found, in contrast to the model found in Art. XX of the GATT agreement. As one possible option and alternative, the paper discusses a competition-oriented approach, which, in the field of intellectual property protection for example, would argue for giving more scope to national sovereignty in situations in which markets are kept apart. In addition, rules on international competition law should guarantee that national policies, regarding the issue of exhaustion for instance, are not undermined by agreements between parties trying to split up markets along national borders. In addition, international law may provide for exceptions from the application of WTO rules. For several reasons, states should even maintain in principle their sovereignty over defining additional interests. In its concluding remarks, the paper rejects the over-stressed antagonism between liberal market principles and protection principles, a conflict that can be bridged, at least partially, by the adoption of international competition rules as an instrument protecting both free trade and diffuse consumer interests. However, competition rules alone cannot solve all problems. More advanced forms of a constitutional approach need to be considered. As regards these, to guarantee the full participation of the stake-holders and to simultaneously protect the democratic principle, wide discretion should be granted to national legislatures as regards regulation.