Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

70 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
name a few examples, trade unions mobilized public protests, work stoppages
and strikes against the state’s privatization plans. Proponents of neoliberal
reforms have discounted unionized opposition arguing that these
represent ‘narrow’ vested interests (Noll 2002; Petrazzini 1996a). Union
opposition, nevertheless, often paved the way to larger public negotiations
over the terms of neoliberal reform – including raising concerns
about foreign ownership and regional inequality, and drawing attention
to the issue of corporate accountability. Intense opposition by unions in
these cases led to a recognition by state reformers, however reluctantly,
that organized labour was indeed an important ‘stakeholder’ in future policy
debates (Chakravartty 2004; Dubb 1999; Horwitz 2001). A common
theme raised by organized labour across the South was concerns about
neocolonial patterns of ownership that would emerge as state enterprises
were replaced by foreign transnationals. In most cases, national governments,
while liberalizing access to value-added services, maintained
strict restrictions on foreign and private ownership in basic telecommunications
services in this first stage of reforms, allaying fears of foreign
and private takeover of a strategic national sector.
As these reforms were carried out, rapid growth in the sector was not
a result of the moral superiority of competition alone, since in practice
telecommunications services remained a monopoly or at best a duopoly in
most instances. Although a plethora of new corporate players entered the
expanded telecommunications markets offering a range of new services,
there was little competition between providers of basic telecommunications
services within a defined geographic area. Consequently, it was not
competition that drove sudden expansion of the sector in much of the
world, but rather massive new investment in the number of main telephone
lines and the digitalization of switching and networks. In almost all
cases, a combination of privatization schemes and higher rates of public
investment led to double-digit growth in teledensity figures throughout
the 1990s and continuing today (see Table 3. 3).
Private telecommunications operators were drawn to emerging markets
like Brazil, China and India, among others, because technological
innovation coupled with policy reforms promised access to lucrative highdensity
business and urban middle-class consumers. In each of these three
cases, national institutional actors continued to raise concerns about domestic
political and economic priorities in negotiating the reregulation of
the sector according to rules inscribed in the arenas of global governance.
The few comparative studies of telecommunications reform in the South
show that the political environment – whether the state is responsive to
democratic public interest – and its relative power vis-à-vis foreign capital
and G8 nations have shaped the terms of reform. 9