Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 59
was first incorporated in 1903, and, by 1947, the ITU became a specialized
agency within the United Nations (Lee 1996). Following the Second
World War, newly independent nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle
East, as well as many nations in Latin America, replaced the private monopolies
with ties to colonial powers with state-owned monopolies. Until
the 1980s, international telecommunication policy was regulated by a stable
set of norms that allowed for the setting of standards, tariffs, allocation
of radio frequencies and satellite orbital positions.
While this was a period of relative stability in the international regulatory
arena, that is not to discount political tensions within the ITU,
fuelled by both the Cold War and the growing divergence of opinion between
the minority ‘developed’ and majority ‘developing’ nations. Both
factors were important in terms of the transnational coordination over
the allocation of satellite orbital positions and radio frequencies (see, for
example, Hamelink 1994: 74–94).Throughout this period, although the
ITU was the most important multilateral regulatory body in the arena
of telecommunications policy, it was designed as a ‘weak’ institution by
member nations reluctant to ‘cede sovereignty over potentially strategic
areas of communication’ and thus focused primarily on technical matters
(Siochrú et al. 2002: 41). International coordination of policy reflected
the ‘modern ideals’ of national integration and standardization evident
in welfare-state objectives in the West promoting a public, or in the exceptional
cases of the US and Canada, a private, national monopoly over
networks and services. In the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe but
also other countries ‘belonging’ to the Western Block, telecommunications
networks were centralized and regulated directly by the state. In
the developing world, the postcolonial state linked the growth of infrastructures
with national development.
In the Fordist regulatory era, the dominant policy discourse assumed
that telecommunications networks functioned most efficiently as natural
monopolies because of the enormous fixed costs required to build
and upgrade any national network. The rationale for monopoly in telephone
manufacturing and services was based on the understanding that
centralization of operations would be more reliable because monopolies
could best tap economies of scale and scope to better achieve growth and
equity. Much of the world therefore relied on state ownership and operation
of their Post and Telecommunications Operator (PTO), investing
revenues to provide national standardized services. 4 Networks were regulated
at the national level through a system of cross-subsidy, whereby urban
areas subsidized rural areas, long-distance rates subsidized local rates,
large (corporate) users subsidized residential users, and telecommunications
revenues subsidized the postal system. Given this economic logic,