Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 57
broadband, cellular and satellite networks catering to transnational corporate
users, translated into hundreds of billions of dollar of debt for
these same firms since 2000. The massive investment corresponded with
increasingly rapid and complex patterns of conglomeration, mergers and
transnational alliances between local and long-distance service providers,
broadband and digital cable companies and firms specializing in satellite
and wireless services. 3 Beginning in 2000, a global glut in telecommunications
capacity, combined with a series of highly public corruption scandals
involving telecommunications giants like WorldCom, raised new
concerns about corporate accountability in the sector.
Today the industry is once again undergoing a series of transnational
mergers where national regulators are encouraging a new round of consolidation
after two decades of promoting deregulation on the normative
grounds that competition improved services for consumers. Perhaps
the most telling example is the current status of AT&T, the US private
telecommunications monopoly that triggered the global deregulation
process in 1984 when national regulators allowed the company to be
broken up into multiple regional ‘baby bell’ service providers (Horwitz
1989). In 2005, AT&T’s monopoly has been replaced by an oligopoly
made up of four regional telecommunications providers including SBC,
the ‘baby bell’ that is ‘swallowing its former parent’ AT&T which will
‘live on as the business division’ providing services for corporate clients
(Belson 2005). Similarly, Verizon is in the process of buying up MCI,
therefore reversing the twenty years of competition between local and
long-distance providers that served as the model for reform for most
other nations.
The processes of consolidation that we see today are taking place
in a multipolar universe of telecommunications giants based in Europe
and North America, but also the Asia Pacific and Latin America (see
Table 3.2). In order to make sense of the normative basis for this global
shift, we turn to the historical context of the evolution and disintegration
of the national public-interest model of telecommunications regulation.
Historicizing telecommunications policy
and national public interest (1950–1980)
The colonial legacy of international telecommunications policy dates
back to the 1865 when the (then) International Telegraph Union (ITU)
emerged as the first international organization established by twenty
European countries to coordinate common technological standards and
protocols between member nations, including their colonies. The US and
other sovereign nations continued joining the organization as telephony