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170 Communication, Commerce and Power
behavioral regulation - has enabled established companies to consol-
idate their holdings and, when possible, undermine prospective
competitors. As represented in the cable television industry's attempt
to block DDS, the recent history of the domestic communications
and information market again and again has featured such anti-
competitive activities. The relative efficiencies of DDS systems
impelled established cable operators to conspire against their intro-
duction in the domestic market. In light of the transnational broad-
casting capabilities of DDS, this conspiracy produced quite the
opposite of what the cultural imperialism paradigm might anticipate:
the cable companies actively worked to prevent the development of
expanding North American markets for their programing and, in
effect, more general corporate promotions. While the long-term estab-
lishment of such transnational markets mostly benefiting US-based
TNCs may well come about, the case of DDS again raises the need for
more precise theorizations and detailed research. American state
structures took many years to redress these anti-competitive activities,
and FCC efforts to encourage DDS developments using a policy
approach almost totally absent of behavioral regulation proved to
be an illusory remedy.
7.2 DDS, DIGITALIZATION AND HDTV
The two corporations most active in DDS developments - General
Motors (GM) (through its subsidiary Hughes Communications) and
News Corporation International - also control a range of related
information-based commodity interests. In 1984, General Motors, in
pursuing a policy of restructuring and corporate 'rationalization'
involving wage-restraint packages, worker lay-offs and plant reloca-
tions, purchased the world's largest data-processing company, Elec-
tronic Data Systems, for $2.5 billion. One year later it bought Hughes
Aircraft for $5 billion. GM's long-term rationale for this entry into
communications and information-based activities involved the forma-
tion of a fully integrated intra-corporate computerized information
system with the capability of instantaneously linking internationally
segmented factory floors with head office. Beyond its attempts at
setting a world standard for such technologies, GM, like many other
TNCs, applied these resources in efforts to reduce day-to-day produc-
tion costs (including labor costs through the use of computers and
factory robotics), to increase the efficiency and flexibility of its diverse