Page 16 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Introduction 3

The disjuncture between the rising importance of infonnation and
communication activities for the United States in the international
political economy and its apparent neglect within the American state -
as illustrated by the case of Dennis LeBlanc - also underlines a
general absence of a comprehensive understanding of how the
American state operates in relation to the ever-changing political,
economic, technological and cultural circumstances related to this
increasingly important policy area. In the early 1980s, the urgent
need to forge a global free flow of information - America's
long-established quest for an international regime in which the
right to move infonnation into and out of nation states would,
under most circumstances, trump the right of governments to exercise
national sovereignty - was becoming a core issue for more and more
US and foreign-based corporations. They sought the reform of
national and international institutions and regulatory regimes in
ways that would facilitate their use of transnational services through
applications of information and communication technology. The
development and implementation of the direct broadcast satellite
(DBS), while one of several significant technologies to have emerged
9
in the 1980s, reveals a number of crucial insights into this more
general history.

1.1. DBS, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE INFORMATION
ECONOMY

Particularly since 1945, American public andprivate sector officials
have acted as the provocateurs par excellence of international commu-
nications. The telecommunication satellite (telesatellite) constitutes
the most powerful of US-led communication developments, and
DBS has emerged to be perhaps the most significant of these. Because
of its unprecedented capacity to penetrate sovereign borders with
electronic signals, in the 1970s DBS became a front-line issue in an
almost universal resistance to US communication policy initiatives. By
the mid-1980s, the DBS issue was somewhat marginalized. Telesatel-
lites generally were treated as components of more comprehensive
developments involving the reform of international institutions and
regimes. These refonns were seen to be the essential prerequisites for
the development of a global information economy. Again, at the end
of the twentieth century, DBS has become a technology of extraor-
dinary political, economic and social importance. DBS applications