  The N=4 superconformal Yang-Mills theory on flat four-dimensional Minkowski
space is a de-confined gauge theory in the sense that the string tension for
fundamental representation coloured quarks vanishes. In fact, static
fundamental representation quarks which lie in certain half-BPS
super-multiplets do not interact at all. An interesting question asks whether
such quarks would carry a well-defined global colour charge which, when the
gauge is fixed, should have the status of an internal symmetry. We shall
present a simple paradigmatic model which suggests that the answer to this
question lies in the way in which infrared divergences are dealt with.
