Page 172 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

162 Communication, Commerce and Power

barriers to this trade, provide government support for indigenous
telecommunications and data processing industries, and develop
national strategies for increasing their share of the world market
are significantly affecting the ability of US firms to maintain their
predominance. 2

Bortnick continued to explain that while foreign governments support
local companies in their efforts to participate directly in the US
market, these countries have also maintained tariff and non-tariff
barriers to the free flow of information. As a result of the liberal-
ization of the domestic market, US firms thus faced increased
competition at home while encountering constraints in relation to
equipment sales, data flows and electronic-based service exports in
overseas markets. The ultimate result of this situation, if it persists,
would be the obstruction of America's 'general economic growth . .J
Beyond such US market access opportunities, with few exceptions,
foreign governments initially resisted US pressures to take up the
structural regulation model. There were several reasons for this.
Many used their P1Ts both as alternative (non-taxation) revenue-
generating vehicles and as levers through which the profits made
from long-distance services could subsidize the development of local
infrastructures. Resistance to the reciprocal market access demands
raised by American interests thus involved more 'material' interests
than cultural sovereignty concerns alone. 4
By the mid-1980s, in part as an outcome of divestiture, AT&T had
become perhaps the best positioned of all US corporations to particip-
ate in the prospective international enhanced services market. Reagan
administration officials argued that the rapid internationalization of
AT&T (and IBM) was necessary in order to compete with the growth
of mostly Japanese-based companies in world markets. To some
extent, divestiture had implications exceeding these and other such
growth expectations. Domestic liberalization measures begat demands
for reciprocity in foreign markets as well as new pressures to further
domestic liberalization measures. The RBOCs, for instance, aggres-
sively pursued FCC approval to participate in the distribution of
television and other information-based services through their estab-
lished telephone lines by arguing that their participation in the video
services market constituted the essential revenue-generating vehicle
needed to pay for their deployment of a national fiber-optic cable
infrastructure. Using similar arguments, the US cable television indus-
try, in 1984, convinced Congress to eliminate FCC oversight of the