The institutional setting of open gas networks and markets is revealing considerably diverse and diverging roads taken by the US, the EU and Australia. We will show that this is explained by key choices made in the primary liberalization process. This primary liberalization is based on a definition of network access rights, which leads to different regimes for the transmission services, as well as for the gas commodity trade, as commodity trade depends on the network services to get any market deal actually implemented. Not only do those choices depend on the physical architecture of the network, but also the perceived difficulties and institutional costs of coordinating the actual transmission services through certain market arrangements.