Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

78 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
The discussion of these three cases provides a small glimpse of the wider
and much more varied experiences that make up the specific process of
telecommunications reform in the developing world. The objective here
is to suggest that the legitimacy of reregulation of telecommunications
governance is not assured in the local contexts where they are applied. We
should also point out that opposition to new modes of governance takes
place in the context of disillusionment and discontent with what existed
before, in these cases, the failings of some form of state-led models of
development and modernization in the telecommunications sector.
Beyond telecommunications policy and towards
the fractured Information Society
We began the chapter by discussing the Okinawa Charter and the G8 nations’
new-found concern with the growing ‘global digital divide’, remedied
through private-sector participation and civil-society engagement.
We argued that the symbolic power of the neoliberal rules of governance
embodied in documents like the Okinawa Charter have to be located
in a historical context. We have traced the dominance of and ultimate
challenge to the Fordist regulatory discourse in the field of telecommunications
governance in order to show the coherence as well as the gaps
in the logic of national public-interest models. We also outlined how
Northern political actors, transnational corporations and policy-makers
from G8 nations and in multilateral organizations played a pivotal role in
designing and implementing the reregulation of the industry across the
world at rapid speed since the 1980s.
The second part of the chapter focused on the experiences of the South
as national governments implemented telecommunications reforms in
order to highlight the political, economic and cultural conditions that
explain the internal legitimacy of these reforms in practice. We must
qualify that, in speaking of the experiences of the South, we are less interested
in generalizations, but try instead to map and explore common
features of the ways in which postcolonial states negotiate the terms of
telecommunications policy. The cases of Brazil, China and India are of
importance not only because of their relative economic power as emerging
economies but also because they offer us different kinds of examples
of support as well as visible resistance to the norms of global governance.
Today throughout much of the world, state telecommunications monopolies
have been replaced by a small handful of transnational firms
who primarily target the most lucrative markets – business users and the
internally stratified category of the globalized and ‘new middle classes’