Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

72 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
In this last section we consider how the new institutional reality of
the WTO in 1995 posed new challenges for national governments in
the South. In order to follow these changes more carefully, the next
section provides a brief overview of three relatively powerful emerging
economies, and the shifting role of the nation-state as it liberalizes
telecommunications policy, while facing pressures from both translational
capital and multilateral policy convergence.
Corporate discipline and unruly publics (1996–2005)
Pressure from TNCs to play a bigger role in multilateral telecommunications
reform was acute throughout the 1980s, but became formalized
within the ITU in 1994. At this time, a ‘second tier of membership was
created to facilitate greater participation of the private sector and NGOs’
(Siochrú et al. 2002: 49). In reality, telecommunications companies have
driven the policy agenda with minimal participation by NGOs, who have
less power, fewer experts and access to the privately funded meetings
that increasingly define policy goals. A recent study found that ‘more aid
money now goes into creating governance regimes than to developing
the communications networks and services that people will actually use’.
This same study points out that within the ITU, the private sector has
come to ‘out-number governments 450 to 187’ (Winsek 2002: 24–5).
The pressure for reregulating telecommunications to reflect neoliberal
trade norms is most apparent when we turn to the new multilateral
institution of telecommunications governance: the WTO. The Uruguay
Rounds of the GATT ended in 1994 with sixty nations committing to
liberalization of value-added services – cellular phones, paging, privateleased
networks etc. – but only eight willing to liberalize basic telecommunications
and public-data networks (Siochrú et al. 2002: 57). It would
take another three years of negotiations within the newly created WTO
to establish the ABT, which would require all sixty-nine signatories to
liberalize gradually their telecommunications service markets fully, as
well as establish independent regulatory agencies similar in form to the
US FCC. With US policy-makers and corporate lobbyists leading the
push for liberalization in the WTO, it is not coincidental that the 1996
Telecommunications Act commits to opening up competition in all markets
in telecommunications services, thereby fundamentally altering the
domestic legal framework that had guided universal telecommunications
provision (Aufderheide 1999). The explicit commitment to liberalization
in basic services, and the transformation of regulation as a ‘technical’
function to ensure efficient operation of markets, is a drastic departure
for most states in the South. The WTO agreement elevated the mode of