Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 69
rhetoric of development in the economic realm to justify corrupt practices,
in many instances reproducing colonial technologies of governance.
In the area of telecommunications this meant everything from influential
politicians or bureaucrats taking bribes from foreign equipment manufacturers
to politicians reserving telephone lines for friends and family, and
much in between. For the news and emerging business media in urban
centres across the developing world, it was issues like these that catalyzed
important sections of public opinion against the state and towards market
solutions to expand and modernize services (Chakravartty 2001b).
Domestic policy-makers, often ‘experts’ trained in US business and
law schools with stints at the World Bank and the ITU, consequently explained
that the urgency of reforms was a direct result of the failing performance
of state enterprises. The solution spelled out by numerous World
Bank and ITU policy reports was to implement a comprehensive reform
process that would enable competition and technological modernization,
promising to balance the concerns of equity with those of efficiency. In
theory this included the deregulation of the state-operated network with
the ultimate goal of privatization, liberalization of the supply of services,
and the separation of the government’s policy and regulatory arm from
its responsibilities as a network operator. In effect, most governments in
this first period of liberalization implemented some form of privatization
whereby state-operated telecommunications monopolies were either sold
to private investors or re-organized as private corporations (corporatization).
Early reformers such as Chile (1988) and Argentina and Mexico
(1990) led the way in allowing a certain amount of foreign ownership in
basic networks, followed up in a few years by allowing foreign competitors
to enter long-distance and other value-added markets, with other
countries quickly adopting similar strategies (Singh 1999; Tigre 1999).
In this way, privatization almost always came before regulatory reform,
which might have allowed the possibility of balancing efficiency and equity
and demonstrates that the impetus for reform was driven by the
need to ‘generate revenue’ for national governments ‘strapped for funds’.
Economist Roger Noll writes plainly:
Thus part of the impetus for neoliberal reform in telecommunications
and other infrastructure sectors had nothing to do with performance,
but instead the possibility to use their reform as a means to ease the
pain of the larger neoliberal reform agenda. (Noll 2002: 13)
Although influential urban middle classes supported neoliberal reforms
on the grounds of state inefficiency, opposition to privatization schemes
was a common feature of broader public sentiment against globalization.
In Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Puerto Rico, India and South Africa, to