Page 24 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Introduction 11

Commission's (FCC's) initial DBS licensees, granted in the early
1980s, failed to establish viable services. More generally, the historical
and structural conditions that had produced an ensemble of federal
agencies incapable of making and implementing cohesive and long-
term foreign communication policies were unintentionally made
even less effective through reform efforts involving neo-liberal re-
regulatory developments during this period. While the Reagan admin-
istration attacked established international institutions, intra-state
efforts to coordinate US foreign communication policy better
remained lacking primarily due to the absence of an undisputed leader
among state agencies. The Office of the United States Trade Repre-
sentative (USTR) and its expanding mandate to reform international
trade institutions emerged to fill this vacuum. By the mid-1980s, a
complex overlapping of communications with trade policy had taken
root. Free-flow policy aspirations now were to be achieved through
free trade. US corporations directly concerned with free flow devel-
opments considered this trade approach to be a viable means of
overcoming foreign resistance, while other American companies
came to recognize themselves to be increasingly dependent on trans-
national communication capabilities.
Inadequate US policy-making structures led to a foreign commun-
ication policy crisis and the compulsion to restructure the American
state. In Chapter 6, 'Exporting Liberalization and the Ascendancy of
Trade,' this complex and often problematic process is related both to
agency and structure involving a growing demand, initiated by mostly
US-based fmancial services, computer services and telecommunication
equipment companies, for the neo-liberal re-regulation of domestic
and international activities. A remarkable effort driven by the private
sector to promote the ideals of competition and trade reciprocity for
information-based products and services emerged from this. These
forces and this crisis also involved the ascent of the USTR as
America's front-line state agent, both promoting free trade and resist-
ing foreign and international legal precedents that could be used to
retard future communication policy aspirations.
A push to include service sector activities and intellectual property
rights in the Uruguay Round GATT negotiations subsequently con-
stituted the core international institutional reform pursued in efforts
to redress the American foreign communication policy crisis. And
while DBS plans and applications played a marginal role in what
turned out to be a generally successful strategy, the emergence of a
de facto international free flow regime through trade-based