Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

56 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
research and development and ultimately privatizing the delivery of premium
capacity networks for large users. In this way national governments
delegate authority to private infrastructure and service providers, often
through tax exemptions provided by the national and/or regional government
to attract foreign investment within specific segmented markets.
Graham and Marvin (2001) describe the logic of the glocalization of the
segmented telecommunications sector:
Multiple providers offer private fibre optic networks that are configured
to bypass local networks and interconnect sites on global corporate
networks seamlessly and reliably. These networks are highly selective;
they tend to be limited to the top fifty business and finance cities
and are configured to meet the needs of the largest corporate users. In
specialist ‘back office zones’ in the Caribbean and Ireland, meanwhile,
specialist telecommunications operators offer multiple networks to
allow the insurance, retail and financial service sectors to export routine
administrative functions from low-wage enclaves. In addition, a
wide range of private Internet ‘pipes’ are being deployed to bypass the
constraints of old Internet trunks so that content delivery networks
can be operated which enable the high-speed delivery of media and
e-commerce services to selected affluent markets by the major media
conglomerates. (2001: 172)
This form of segmentation results from the ‘erosion’ of the universal
service model resulting from the changes in the field of telecommunications
policy governance at the national level. In tracing the history of
telecommunications reform in Canada, Winseck (1995) has argued that
beginning in the mid-1980s, the ‘means/end relation between competition
and social policy changed. Competition became an end in itself,
marking the transformation of regulation from social policy to industrial
policy.’ Graham and Marvin (2001) argue that these transformations
are part of an overall shift away from national ‘public works monopolies’
within infrastructure industries – including water, energy and transportation
– towards glocal premium networks creating a new form of
‘splintering urbanism’. Critical urban studies scholars like Michael Peter
Smith (1999) argue that these new inequalities that arise within major urban
areas and across cities globally should be studied with an awareness
of translocal networks that connect and marginalize communities across
national boundaries.
Throughout the 1990s, telecommunications and media conglomerates
took unprecedented financial risks to build these translocal telecommunications
networks. 2 Intense competition to buy licences to operate
basic telephony in emerging markets, as well as massive investments in