Page 219 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Conclusion 209

and the leisure time and the cultural conceptualization of 'leisure'
required to justify these investments. Even in relatively developed
countries, a disparity in the availability of basic services, like the
telephone, has grown as costs have increased. 18 Because relatively
expensive information services often are themselves prerequisites to
the development of the intellectual capacities needed to access and
comprehend more specialized (and expensive) services, the ability to
take full advantage of many information-based commodities is
directly related to pre-existing intellectual, economic and/or organiza-
tional capacities. 19 In sum, what can be termed the commoditization of
information is reinforcing domestic and international social-economic
disparities despite the presence of apparently more accessible commun-
ication technologies, information services, and their assumed liberalizing
or liberating implications? 0
Beyond such outcomes and the insidious implications of world
communications being dominated by relatively fewer and larger cor-
porate entities (and the inherent difficulties of redressing monopoly
behavior on a global scale), we should not lose sight of the fact that
nation states, as core institutional mediators, also can be centers (if not
organizers) of resistance. In the United States, for example, the Tele-
communications Act generally has been applauded for apparently
stimulating competition and its promotion of potentially seamless
information highway developments. Its long-term international impli-
cations, however, ironically involve a world characterized by less
competition and increasing disparities between large-scale and
wealthy customers and the relatively poor and powerless. In this
type of economic order, political and economic volatility becomes
more probable as a result of potential disparities emerging between
international corporations and national business and customer inter-
ests. This contradiction may well generate a resurgence of the popular
authority of the nation state. In the telecommunications sector, the
recently reformed ITU, for example, may well face difficulties main-
taining its mask of objectivity. As the information economy becomes
a truly transnational marketplace, and assuming a continuation of
technical change and at least some competition involving a US 'cham-
pion' seeking access into overseas markets, and so forth, the Union
could well become a forum of explicit private sector conflict. In other
words, the structural reformulation of the ITU - itself designed to
accommodate a range of information economy corporate interests-
eventually may lead to the Union's political de-legitimation. Already,
TNCs such as Motorola are sending personnel to act as officials in the