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TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 79
who live in the ‘splintering’ global cities described above. We have argued
that the massive expansion in telecommunications infrastructure
was not a result of the moral superiority of competition but rather the
prioritization by nation-states of the sector as a development priority in
the context of global integration. In many cases, governments generated
revenues by selling licenses for telecom services, with private firms bidding
extravagantly for the most highly valued emerging markets, such as
Brazil’s privatization of Telebrás that raised an estimated $18.85 billion
in 1998 (Singh 1999).
The targeting of the relatively wealthy sections of the population
within national economies does not discount the explosive growth in
overall access to telecommunications worldwide since the 1990s, with the
most spectacular increases in the spread of mobile telephony. Impressive
rates of expansion in access to mobile telephony and community-based
Internet kiosks in urban as well as some rural areas have been seen by organizations
like the ITU as well as many NGOs involved in development
as central to combating poverty and inequality and encouraging accountability
from both public and private institutions. Beyond the measurable
objectives of development, access to these new technologies has transformed
everyday life for the majority of the world’s urban population, in
ways that we are only now recognizing in new studies of global urban
culture and politics. 13
Our focus on the experiences of postcolonial states showed us that
the lack of legitimacy of the previous model helped mobilize public support
for a liberalization paradigm pushed by Northern institutional actors.
Nevertheless, scepticism by multiple publics about the cost of rapid
global integration and the growing gap between the promise and reality
of the fractured information economy helped slow down the pace of
reform where national governments had manoeuvring power. In 2005,
we saw that the legitimacy of the market as a solution to the failure of
the state seems to be increasingly questioned in both the South and the
North. The era of telecommunications privatization actually witnessed
the proliferation of corruption, and, with the telecommunications bubble
bursting officially in 2000, public attention turned to both state and corporate
accountability (See Table 3.4). Even in the US, the 1990s euphoria
associated with the deregulation and privatization of infrastructure industries
like energy and telecommunications has vanished with a series
of highly public corruption scandals that began in 2000. Today, images of
former C.E.Os, like WorldCom’s Bernard J. Ebbers, walking to court in
handcuffs serve to restrain the market triumphalism, justifying reforms
in these sectors throughout the 1990s.