Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 65
to exert greater influence within the ITU to pressure member states in the
South to open their markets to foreign firms (Lee 1996: 176). The growing
influence of corporate actors in multilateral policy-making bodies like
the ITU corresponded with a renewed focus and concern about telecommunications
disparity in the South, an issue that became paramount in
development circles in the mid-1980s.
Although the ITU had officially recognized the ‘special character’ of
telecommunications as a ‘medium of economic and social development’
as early as the 1950s (O’Siorchu et al. 2002: 40), it was only in the 1980s
that the ITU along with the World Bank and the IMF began to promote
the ‘Missing Link’ between economic development and ‘telecommunications
penetration’. The 1984 publication of the ITU-sponsored influential
Maitland Commission Report condemned the extreme inequalities
of telephone access between rich and poor nations. Although the report
drew global attention to the relatively novel issue of information disparity,
its recommendations pressed for the need to reform inefficient national
public monopolies and promote the transfer of technologies from advanced
to developing nations. The ITU report argued that investment in
telecommunications should no longer be seen as a luxury service for corporate
and national elites, but rather as an essential service that directly
leads to economic growth. Reflecting the new technologically driven consensus
in policy circles, the report overemphasized the causality between
‘telephone penetration’ and economic growth (Samarajiva and Shields
1990). Policy experts in the ITU and the World Bank claimed that investment
in the newest telecommunications technologies would allow
developing countries to actually ‘leapfrog’ over stages of development
(Wellenius and Stern 1994).
The first phase of reforms in the South consisted of the liberalization
of the equipment market but, by 1986, discussions within the Uruguay
Round of the GATT introduced the economically more significant area
of trade in telecommunications services. US-based transnational firms
ranging from credit card companies to telecommunication, media and
computer service providers had been lobbying the US government for
over a decade to include services along with manufactured goods in the
purview of the GATT. This would mean that member states would agree
to reduce and eventually eliminate tariffs and trade barriers in the area of
services – including telecommunications services. An initial overwhelming
comparative advantage held by Northern industries in the area of
services prompted eight years of opposition and negotiation between
‘developing’ economies such as India and Brazil against the US and its
Western European and East Asian allies. Ultimately, opposition gave way
to agreement, as developed countries conceded to open their markets to