Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

66 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
agriculture and textiles while developing countries found it harder to argue
against the basic tenets of neoliberal trade, reinforced by mounting
pressures from the World Bank and IMF. 6
Critics of this process point out that the ITU, along with the more
powerful World Bank and the IMF, began promoting the expanded role
of the private sector in telecommunications development just as transnational
telecommunications firms began to play a greater role in influencing
policy with the objective of entering new, lucrative markets especially
in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Jill Hills (1998) argues
that transnational equipment manufacturers like Alcatel, NEC, Erickson,
British Telecommunication, US West and others, worked with the
World Bank and the IMF to direct foreign investment at concessional
financing to governments that opened their markets. According to Mc-
Chesney and Schiller, the intense corporate lobbying and the ‘promise of
access’ to the US corporate telecommunications market explained why
much of the rest of the world eventually agreed to what accounted for a
total overhall in the way that the telecommunications infrastructure was
organized and regulated (2003: 18). However, for advocates of reform,
the shift among policy-makers in both the North and the South was a
response to the failures of the state to promote growth, expansion and
consumer choice. The same reformers have argued that it was the very
‘success of neoliberal economic reform in Asia and South America [that]
put even the most politically untouchable forms of monopoly up for consideration
by the mid-1990s’. Moreover, they contend that, ‘the soaring
US economy, symbolized by its resurgent information industry’ served as
‘added stimulus for other nations following the US lead’ in liberalization
(Cowhey and Klimenko 1999: 3).
Corporate pressure, backed by the US and other G7 nations lobbying
intensely at the GATT and the ITU, was reinforced by the conditions
imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, whose lending was contingent
on liberalization. For smaller economies with less political influence, the
outcome was one of being forced to privatize in order to maintain investor
confidence. Based on his study of the experience of the Caribbean
economies, Hopeton Dunn (1995) has shown that smaller debt-ridden
states had little power in negotiating the terms of telecommunications
reform against the influence of the US and the UK, which lobbied
intensely on behalf of their home-based telecommunications transnationals.
Gerald Sussman (2001) has argued that Mexico implemented a
‘radical reform process’ when NAFTA rules went into effect in 1995,
leading to the statutory lifting of foreign ownership restrictions and
the introduction of laws that required telecommunications companies
to lower long-distance rates while raising local rates. At the same time,