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16 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
needs has led to ‘uneven biases’ in the development of telecommunications
around the world. Finally, the economic centrality of telecommunications
services for TNCs puts pressures on national governments to
separate the needs of corporate users of high-speed networks and services
from the public networks, creating new levels of information disparity and
a ‘new geography of inequality’ (Sassen 1999).
Social constructionists also reject the dominant view on telecommunications
policy on the grounds of technological determinism. While
this school agrees that social relations shape policy, they are less convinced
that political economic structures determine technological outcome.
They focus less on broader macro-power imbalances (at the level
of capital, nation or class), and more on meso- or micro-power relations
at the level of institutional struggle. These critics begin by recognizing
that the older model of national telecommunications policy failed to meet
anywhere near universal service objectives in most societies in the world,
and they seek instead institutional solutions that can identify the causal
‘relationships between social, institutional and political factors and the development
and applications of technologies’ (Graham and Marvin 2000:
151). Although much of this work critiques the simplistic notion that
competition is a catch-all alternative to public ownership or regulation,
the focus of this research is on the operation of autonomous regulatory
agencies that can hold both state and private actors accountable in local
contexts. As such, researchers in this tradition propose public-policy solutions
institutionalizing competition and innovation while taking into
account questions of equitable distribution and access (Mansell 2001).
At issue in these analyses of reform is the changing meaning of public
interest as an objective of communications policy (van Cuilenburg and
McQuail 2003). Not only are new questions being raised about who exactly
represents public interest in an era of ‘liberalization’, but, as the
state’s role changes from owner to regulator, new concerns are being
voiced about the accountability of both state and corporate actors at the
local, national and global level.
Historicizing shifts in communications policy
and public interest in the West
When describing the historical development of communications policy
in the Western world, van Cuilenburg and McQuail (2003) identify
three periods of communications policy paradigms that express the definition
and understanding of ‘public interest’. These periods are identified
from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginnings of the Second World
War characterized by ‘piece meal accumulation of measures, with varying