Page 203 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

8 Conclusion:

Communication, Culture

and American Hegemony

Until recently, despite its status as a relatively ideal transnational
broadcasting technology, proponents of DBS in the United States
for the most part have been marginally positioned in relation to
dominant corporate interests and the priorities of foreign policy offi-
cials. Instances of status quo information commodity corporations
promoting direct broadcasting developments - such as Comsat's
failed efforts in the early 1980s - are rare, whereas instances of
other powerful interests working to suppress DBS developments -
such as the efforts of the US cable television industry - are not.
More generally, US foreign communication policy, historically unco-
ordinated and leaderless, in the 1980s became the target of an evolving
private sector campaign to recast free flow legal efforts into trade-
based services and intellectual property rights negotiations. The sub-
sequent ascendancy of the USTR and its largely unanticipated role as
a powerful and centrally positioned foreign communication policy
agency has helped elevate both the status of information-based com-
modity interests and has itself successfully produced a de facto free
flow of information regime through free trade.
Out of hegemonic crisis, US dominance in information-based com-
modity activities has emerged despite a general ignorance among
American state policy makers regarding the sector's cultural-power
implications. Decades of military-related research and development
funding, a domestic market that has been the wealthiest in the world,
and the presence of entrenched state agents that are relatively dispar-
ate - dominated by private interests and thus generally responsive to
the policy priorities of powerful corporations - all constitute factors
that have facilitated America's renewal.
The domestic liberalization of communication activities uninten-
tionally compelled American telecommunications interests to promote
US re-regulation models world-wide. Out of a foreign communication
policy crisis came a remarkable domestic consensus in which the
American state, quite incapable of deflecting such seemingly universal

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