Page 120 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

DBS and the Structure of US Policy Making 109

capabilities. As such, without the sustained efforts of domestic cor-
porations seeking to establish a transnational DBS service, American
state officials have had little incentive to forge and execute a specific
policy concerning direct broadcasting apart from ad hoc responses to
foreign concerns regarding DBS in its context as a free flow issue.
The United States has never had a single agency or department
responsible for the formulation or implementation of its foreign com-
munication policy. Instead, depending on the specific issue, its context
and the timing of its formulation, a range of political and bureaucratic
actors - including Congressional committees, the White House, the
Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commis-
sion, the United States Information Agency, the State Department
and others - may be involved to various and largely unspecified
degrees. This fragmentation of responsibility should not be of
any great surprise. In part it is a reflection of the predominance of
day-to-day communication activities in the American private sector
involving communication and information producers, users and ser-
vice providers. In part reflecting the relative decline of AT&T, Comsat
and other predominant agents, in the 1980s communication policy
issues usually involved a broad range of actors holding particular
vested interests. In part as a result of this, government agencies and
departments at best aspired to mediate rather than coordinate or lead
private sector activities.
Despite the occasional acknowledgement by senior US policy offi-
cials of the role that DBS could play in stimulating future interna-
tional technological convergence developments, US policy has
'often ... [taken] the form of a shopping list of negotiated objectives
advocated by competing interest groups.' But rather than character-
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izing the federal bureaucracy as merely the passive conduit of such
interests, the structural conditions in which they are received and
delineated have directly shaped policy outputs. The US Constitution,
for example, compels the separation of powers between the executive,
legislative and judicial branches of government. For foreign commun-
ication policy developments - given the increasingly intimate relation-
ship among domestic corporate actiVIties and international
communications - the constitutional supremacy of the executive
branch in foreign policy has generated predictable intra-state con-
flicts. Moreover, private sector dominance over a broad range of
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communication and information activities has been institutionalized
in judicial interpretations of the First Amendment. As such, an
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'activist' state has been inhibited while inter-agency (and to some