Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 67
all segments of the telecommunications market were opened to competition
from American and Canadian firms, including radio, satellite orbital
slots and local and long-distance telephony. Although foreign ownership
was restricted at 49 per cent for basic services, cellular telephony was not
bound by this restriction. Mexico’s reforms took place a few years earlier
and were more radical than many other nations in the South because
of NAFTA, but this mode of reform was reinforced by the World Bank
where telecommunications privatization became a central conditionality
within the Structural Adjustment Policy (SAP) programmes, as evident
by the privatization schemes initiated in Brazil, Chile, India, Ghana and
Kenya, among others.
These external pressures for national reform have to be weighed according
to the bargaining power of Southern nation-states, and it would
be faulty logic to assume that the expansive range of reforms can be explained
by the power of multilateral institutions and the G7 nations alone.
In explaining the internal factors for reform, we argue that the symbolic
failures of the previous state-led model of telecommunications provision
in much of the South coupled with the allure and speed of modernization
promised through the global integration must be taken into account
(Chakravartty 2004). In considering these internal factors, we hope to
show the grounds for both the legitimacy and contestation of these new
rules of governance.
During the period of nationalized telecommunications operations in
the South, World Bank and ITU experts repeatedly highlighted both low
rates of telephone density – numbers of phones per population – and long
waiting lists for new services and records of consistent patterns of poor
service (Wellenius and Stern 1994). For example, World Bank studies
drew frequent attention to the number of years people who had to wait
for phone installations in 1986 and 1991, when reforms were launched
in these countries: Argentina (4.1), Chile (5.7), Jamaica (9), Malaysia
(1.6), Mexico (4.9), the Philippines (14.7) and Venezuela (2.5)(Galal and
Nauriayal 1995; Noll 1999: 12). Low rates of telephony along with soaring
rates of unmet demand and poor service allowed domestic neoliberal
reformers to make a convincing case that the state had failed to serve the
public interest. While it is very clear that large corporate users were
the main constituents lobbying for reforms, increasingly vocal urban
middle-class users of telecommunications and other state-provided infrastructure
services supported the new regulatory logic of market-based
expansion and efficiency.
By the late 1980s and certainly into the 1990s, a new globalized middle
class of ‘highly educated salaried professionals, technical specialists,
managers and administrators’ in the private and public sectors rejected