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TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 55
somewhere between $250 billion and $1 trillion of state owned telecommunications
networks were sold to private investors and some half of
the 189 member nations of the ITU had partially privatized their domestic
telecommunications sectors (McChesney and Schiller 2003: 18). 1
In order to make sense of these dramatic changes, we outline the basic
economic assumptions that have historically guided telecommunications
regulation on the basis of national public interest.
In contrast to top-down, one-way mass media, the regulation of
telecommunications is based on the assumption of shared resources. In
the case of telephone services, calls made by individual subscribers are
routed through a local exchange, where, using a common connection, the
calls are connected to a bigger regional exchange that uses high-capacity
connections that link major exchanges in order to distribute calls. The
assumption in this model is that the value of this network grows as each
additional user joins the network, precisely because it spreads the fixed
costs around a larger number of users and because it expands the numbers
of people each existing subscriber can contact. Economists argue that because
the network can enhance social benefits beyond the members of the
network, telecommunications should be seen as a ‘public good’ because
of ‘positive externalities. In other words, the greater the number of people
connected to a network actually increases the worth of that network’
(Garnham 2000). Putting this into practice, public-policy experts have
historically argued that the telecommunications network should be seen
as a ‘club’ based on members with mutual interests, as opposed to a market
composed of members with competing interests. Until relatively recently,
these ‘members’ or, in more current language, ‘stakeholders’ have
included different institutional actors within and between national government
bodies and, to a lesser extent, domestic and transnational firms,
labour unions and consumer organizations and public interest groups
(Mansell 1994; Singh 1999). Regulation here should be understood as a
dynamic political process, part of a larger regularization practice that in
this case normalizes among others the changing roles of private telecommunications
industries. As we have seen, corporate stakeholders began
to exert growing influence in both national and transnational telecommunications
policy arenas that had historically been dominated by state
actors, whereas today, many analysts contend that civil-society actors are
emerging as empowered stakeholders in policy arenas.
The impact of all of these changes has meant a dizzying rate of expansion
and transformation that has been recognized by a variety of critics as
deeply uneven (Castells 1996; Sassen 1999, 2001; Schiller 1999). Corporate
actors have taken the lead in pushing for glocal telecommunications
services – global to local networks that bypass national networks – linking