Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

54 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
director of a NGO based in India, writes about the impact of this report as
follows: ‘With neat private sector efficiency, the DOT report gave some
key concepts to what came to be known as ICT4D, and notably, these
form the basic framework of ICT4D thinking even today’ (2005a: 2). The
emphasis on ‘business models’, the involvement of private industry with
the corrective presence of civil society organizations and the assumed
neutrality of communications technologies are some of the key features
of this new global policy framework. The Okinawa Charter is an important
document because it asserts newfound attention to the growing
global ‘digital divide’ and acknowledges that the emerging Information
Society requires some mode of social policy to be determined and implemented
by multistakeholders. The charter also explicitly reproduces the
symbolic dominance of Northern nation-states and transnational capital
in setting the parameters for the new rules of global governance by
coordinating the limits of national or local regulatory intervention.
Following our overview in Chapter 2, we argue that it is crucial to
consider how notions of public interest and accountability emerge and
transform within a given national context, even as the functions of governance
might shift from the national to the transnational spheres. In this
chapter, we assess the changes in the field of global telecommunications
governance but we return to the experiences of nations in the South to
consider more closely the specific political economic and cultural context
of telecommunications reform – the liberalization of the telecommunications
sector – in regions where the pace and extent of change has been
the most dramatic in the last twenty years. We argue that this focus allows
us to pay attention to both the external global factors which explain
the push for reform as well as the historically rooted local factors that
account both for the legitimacy and contestation of the changes in the
rules of governance. In the next section we outline the shift in logic of
the national public-interest model of telecommunications regulation.
Global telecommunications policy today: reregulating
public interest
Between 1990 and 2000, the number of ‘independent’ national telecommunications
regulatory agencies multiplied from 12 to 101, in effect
regulating the new terms of economic liberalization – the opening up
of national markets to foreign investment and introducing competition
– into practice (Samarajiva 2001). In 1997, the WTO passed the
Agreement on Basic Telecommunications (ABT) culminating fifteen
years of debate over the terms of the new rules of trade with the liberalization
of telecommunications services. Meanwhile, between 1984 and 1999,