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THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 121
Order’ where economic benefits and social interests were close partners.
Soon after the election of the Democrats in 1991, these social dimensions
were defeated in the Congress as part of the growing domestic assault
on the redistributive components of the battered American welfare state.
This process intensified as the newly elected Republican majority realized
that it could work together with the fiscally conservative Clinton administration
on welfare ‘reform’, ostensibly dismantling the limited safety
net for women, children and the unemployed (Gordon 1994). In this setting,
the same administration that had introduced these limited means for
public regulation of technological goods and infrastructure in the international
arena retreated defensively from the label of ‘big government’.
The wave of deregulatory policies in the field of telecommunications and
transportation, in particular aerospace, but also other economic sectors
was not accompanied by a counterbalancing, ‘protective’ set of actions
for a more balanced distribution of wealth.
As we discussed in Chapter 3 the deregulation of US telecommunications
was followed by the privatization of British Telecom (BT) the
same year. The EU has also been a global player devoted to a series of
policies that in essence promoted the neoliberal communications reform
agenda. In the late 1980s, the Green Paper on Telecommunications proposed
the same ‘liberalization’ policies for the European telecoms sector
as was followed in the US. After all, the EU is an important market
for the US-based tele/communications industry and without ‘friendlier’
policies, trade in this space would have maintained its costs. This is not to
suggest that the visions of EU and USA policies were identical but rather
to emphasize the fact that harmonization of national policy is a crucial
component of increased trade integration in world regions, coupled with
the construction of a so-called ‘flexible’ regulatory environment, as evident
in the telecommunications sector. The Bangemann Report 2 ‘urged’
the European Commission to embrace a series of policies that would direct
liberalization across Europe. The same year, Al Gore’s proposal for
the building of a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) prepared the
ground for further liberalization and market integration among separate
sectors of the economy: the virtual or ‘seamless’ network and the ‘real’
business, such as sales of videos, distribution of AV works, telephony and
others. The four basic principles of the US version of a GII were the promotion
of competition, open access, ‘flexible regulatory environment’
and universal service 3 (NTIA 1994).
In the 1990s, successive EU policies promoted the liberalization of services
and focused on the introduction of new technologies in businesses
and education. The predictions expressed in the ‘vision’-defining documents
such as the 1993 Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: Challenges