Page 205 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Conclusion 195

'realistic' counter-hegemonic movement. As for the role of direct
broadcasting in maintaining or extending a neo-liberal world order
among non-elites, the promotion of mostly mass market products and
services will dominate DBS information and entertainment transmis-
sions, at least for the foreseeable future. New York-based interna-
tional advertising executive Eric Scheck believes that DBS has played
a significant role in the recent internationalization of US-dominated
television and advertising activities:

In the last five to seven years ... we've gone from the US being
principally the sole commercial market ih television, with a few
very small exceptions, to basically a worldwide commercial
television [market] .... Governments are letting go of their control
over the broadcasting medium ... [and] a lot of it has to do with
governments ... [saying] 'we've given up trying to block the
signals.' 3

The scope, scale and dynamism of US information-based commodity
activities have not discouraged the maintenance of a generally unco-
ordinated and disparate state, and this, in relation to the pervasiveness
of contemporary communication and information technology appli-
cations, has been a factor making the United States the central arbiter
of world infortnation economy developments. The positive implica-
tions for the United States of the successful Uruguay Round GATT
on services and intellectual property underlines the point that the new
free trade consensus not only has been a US-mediated development but
also, in effect, may well constitute the essential foundation for the
economic and even hegemonic renewal of the United States. The con-
temporary free flow of information 'consensus' is being fueled by this
universalization of neo-liberal principles, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and thus its potential support for alternative forms of interna-
tional organization, and the implementation of DBS and other trans-
national and relatively 'personal' technologies. Again, in the context
of these and other developments, DBS now constitutes the technologi-
cal wedge through which the construction of a transnational information
highway can take place. The WTO, for example, provides information
economy capitalists with the international legal stability needed to
make the required investments to construct a virtually seamless,
world-wide communications infrastructure. Knowledge that the Uni-
ted States will probably lead retaliatory efforts against potentially
uncooperative countries constitutes a crucial step forward for these