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64 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
inequality emerge following these regulatory shifts, we argue that the
view from the ‘margins’, and in a global scale the South, reveals opposition
and contestation of the legitimacy of the new rules of governance.
Privatization as salvation: the view from the South (1980–95)
This shift in policy framework was particularly significant for nations
in the South, where liberalization of state-operated telecommunications
networks and services often went hand in hand with the overhaul of their
national economies in the 1980s and 1990s. Within the course of a decade,
a majority of nations in the South had already implemented or were in
the process of implementing liberalization policies which opened strategic
sections of their telecommunications markets to foreign investors, in
most cases, well beyond what most Western nations were willing to do in
the same time period. The shift to privatization in the North was based
on the rationale that the inefficiency of monopolistic state enterprise coupled
with advances in technology undermined the argument for natural
monopoly in telecommunication. Unlike their developed counterparts,
states in the South began to privatize national telecommunications primarily
as a means to reduce debt burdens and invite in foreign capital
and expertise. Experts based in multilateral organizations promised that
the rapid adoption of new technologies offered a means of ‘leapfrogging’
development, literally allowing developing nations the possibility
of ‘skipping’ the industrial revolution for the benefits of the ‘new’ postindustrial
economy (Singh 1999).
The fact that telecommunications services were not recognized as an
economic priority in most of the South until the 1980s was reflected in
very low rates of telephone density (between 1 and 10 per cent) and very
slow absorption of new technologies. In most nations, the state owned and
operated the PTO, and the network was regulated on the basis of crosssubsidy
principles. Domestically, nearly all governments advocated the
ideals of universal or public service, although other, more pressing, economic
priorities relegated state-operated telecommunications networks
to low levels of penetration, especially in rural and low-income areas.
In the multilateral arena, the growing numbers of ‘developing country’
members in institutions like the ITU, led to new tensions over the allocation
of satellite orbital positions and radio frequencies (Hamelink
1994). As we have seen in Chapter 2, the negotiations within the ITU
and other UN bodies represented a specific moment of collective solidarity
for Southern nations in the 1970s that culminated in the call for
NWICO. In this same period, transnational telecommunications firms –
recognizing that markets in the North were increasingly saturated – began