The institutional setting of open gas networks and markets is revealing considerably diverse and diverging roads taken by the US, the EU, Brazil and Australia. We show that this divergence is explained by key choices made in the primary liberalization process, which is based on a redefinition of the transmission system property rights. This redefinition in turn leads to different regimes for the transmission services, as well as for the gas commodity trade, which depends on the network services for any market deal to network, but also the perceived difficulties and institutional costs to coordinate the actual transmission services through certain market arrangements.