Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

3 Governing the central
nervous system of the
global economy:
telecommunications policy
Telecommunications infrastructure has been described as the ‘central
nervous system’ of the very process of globalization (Castells 1996;
Mansell 1994). Access to telecommunications services is increasingly assumed
as a minimum condition of participation in the ‘new economy’ with
the telecommunications industry as the foundation for Information Technology
(IT), new media and financial services. Global advertisements
plastered on television screens and billboards are replete with images of
seamless high-tech networks that instantly link stock markets, urban centres
and ethnically diverse consumers together, erasing national economic
as well as cultural boundaries. Beneath the glamour and the breathless
pace of these new technological transformations are the equally stunning,
if less celebrated, changes in the ways in which telecommunications as an
industry is governed. Beginning in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s,
the deregulation and liberalization of national telecommunications markets
was seen as imperative by policy-makers across the globe. Today,
we see a shift in policy discourse in at least the recognition that there
are social obstacles associated with rapid global integration. The ‘United
Nations Millennium Development Goals’ (see Table 5.2) acknowledges
the centrality of access to communications technologies as vital to the
eradication of global poverty and hunger. As such, access to communications
is seen as a basic human need linked to participation in modern
economic as well as political activity (ITU 2003: 73).
We have seen dramatic changes in the field of telecommunications
governance in the past two decades, influenced most significantly by
the change in the balance of power against national governments and
in favour of the 37, 000 transnational corporations that emerge as a
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