Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 63
inefficiencies in resource allocation and distribution. The sudden focus
on the negative effects of the corrupt behaviour of regulators and bureaucrats
transformed the rules in the field of telecommunications governance,
thus questioning the role of state actors as legitimate guardians
of public interest.
While the influence of corporate lobbying in the Reagan–Thatcher
era of supply-side economics surely contributed enormously to the shift
in telecommunications public-policy discourse in this period, other factors
played a role in challenging the state’s failure to protect the public
interest. In the US, consumer rights and other public interest advocates
were integral to the eventual deregulation of AT&T’s national monopoly
(Horwitz 1989) and, in Europe, Japan and elsewhere in the First World,
inadequacies and unaccountability of state-provided services fuelled a legitimacy
crisis of state-owned infrastructure (Graham and Marvin 2001).
The tangible outcome of these policy shifts was the FCC’s decision to
break up AT&T into twenty-two local companies, with AT&T focusing
on long-distance and ‘value-added’ services. In 1985, 51 per cent of
the British Telecommunications was sold to the private sector, and in
1985 Japan broke up its telecommunications monopoly through Nippon
Telephone & Telegraph (NT&T), and liberalized its overall telecommunications
market (Hamelink 1994: 68–9).
The paradigm shift in regulatory norms favouring market-based competition
had a profound impact beyond the national boundaries of the
Northern nations. With the end of the Cold War and the post-Fordist
discourse of ‘free’ markets, policy-makers around most of the world fell
in line with the strategic consensus about the failure of state-operated
monopolies, promoting instead a new faith in free trade. In terms of
telecommunications policy, traditional concerns for establishing what is
considered ‘fair’ prices and maximum access to services was replaced by a
new emphasis on the performance of home-based corporations in global
trade, procuring favourable balance of payments and ensuring consumer
sovereignty in a competitive market.
This shift in the rules of governance was carried out most dramatically
in the developing world where the debt crisis and the changing
geopolitical order led to a swift transformation in national development
goals. We are exploring the experiences of postcolonial nation-states in
negotiating the terms of reform, keeping in mind that external pressures
only partially explain the political outcomes associated with these
changes, in the rest of the chapter. We argue that the aggressive tactics
used to pressure national governments in the South to adopt telecommunications
privatization schemes have to be assessed within local political
contexts. Although we see new forms of ‘splintering urbanism’ and