Page 19 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

6 Communication, Commerce and Power

At the end of the twentieth century, DBS has become the techno-
logy through which digitalized services can be introduced to transna-
tional consumers - from mass and niche market television
entertainment to database information and software services tailored
for specialized needs. The importance of its digital signal capabilities
and enormous geographic reach cannot be understated. Digital broad-
casting probably constitutes the qualitative and quantitative technical
improvement required to attract consumers to become participants in
a prospective Gil. Most importantly, digital signals provide corporate
interests with the capacity to merge all forms of electronic commun-
ications into a single, inter-active and virtually seamless system. More-
over, because the costs of this potential mega-network are enormous
(the least expensive component being a $1 billion DBS system), it is
doubtful that once a corporation or conglomerate of interests estab-
lish such a mega-network in one region of the world, little if any direct
competition is likely to emerge. 12
Of course DBS systems are more than just unprecedented vehicles
through which world information markets can be penetrated and
subsequently controlled. Direct broadcast satellites also are media
through which corporate 'free speech' and the ideal of individual
'choice' can be promulgated. The latter can take place most directly
through the individual's day-to-day use of his or her 'own' DBS
receiver, which provides that person with seemingly uncensored access
to mostly commercial information and entertainment service pro-
viders from the outside world. In relation to more general interna-
tional infrastructural developments, DBS operators have become, to
some extent, the first comprehensive transnational multiple service
corporations, providing digitalized products to specialized and mass
audiences. Digital DBS constitutes not only the vehicle through which
complementary transnational information-based services can be
offered, it also constitutes a medium through which particular life-
styles and political-economic perspectives can be propagated. With
DBS, both the medium and the message may be used to promote the
interests of the very companies that may become the gatekeepers of
the information economy. 13
Despite or perhaps because of these prescient capabilities, DBS
developments have followed a rather bumpy and problematic path.
The theoretical feasibility of direct broadcasting was established as
early as the mid-1960s. Subsequently, DBS only became a widely
debated political issue in 1972 when the United Nations General
Assembly approved a Soviet Union proposal that the UN develop