Page 127 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

116 Communication, Commerce and Power

preparation provided the United States with the essential resources
needed to negotiate what it considered to be acceptable agreements
with relatively under-resourced LDC delegates. 29
Those private sector interests that participated in preparations for
W ARC-79 or took part in the conference itself were relatively large
corporations, all of whom possessed the resources to maintain full-
time offices and established contacts in Washington with one or more
of the three dominant state agencies. Most importantly, Comsat,
AT&T and others provided extensively researched reports involving
both economic and engineering analyses to substantiate their particu-
lar frequency allocation requests. 30
In the absence of an established agency wholly responsible for US
foreign communication policy, and in the presence of vague but inflex-
ible calls for a free flow of information, the conflicts characterizing
American preparations for W ARC-79 and the seemingly arbitrary
manner in which priorities were established again signalled the need
for a reappraisal of the structural underpinnings of the US foreign
communication policy process. Nevertheless, W ARC-79 generally
was seen to have been a good conference for the United States, given
the success of its delegation in convincing many West European and
communist states that a comprehensive pre-planned GSO and fre-
quency regime was not in the interests of any country aspiring to
become internationally competitive in satellite technologies and appli-
cations. Detailed planning for DBS developments had been agreed to
among Region 1 and Region 3 countries in 1977, largely as a result of a
widespread recognition that both a potentially uncontrolled in-flow of
signals was undesirable and that US interests most probably would
dominate such developments. At WARC-79, the ITU's approval of a
similar arrangement for less threatening satellite technologies- particu-
larly at this formative stage of the West European aerospace industry,
and the aspirations of the Soviet Union in relation to its Intersputnik
telesatellite system - was delayed at least until the first meeting of a
two-part WARC on space communications took place in 1985. 31
But as Washington-based consultant Morris H. Crawford wrote
after W ARC-79, 'a new and precarious course for international com-
munications' was 'charted.' As Crawford saw it, 'the 1979 conference
deviated from the past. It ended an era when allocations were decided
on technical grounds.' 32 In part because the State Department, the
FCC and Commerce were jointly charged with the responsibility of
preparing for the 1985 and 1988 Space WARC meetings, new conflicts
emerged as early as 1982. 33 However, by the time WARC-85 was