Page 67 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Telesate/lite Policy and DBS, 1962-1984 55

interests. During this decade, not even officials in the USIA were
interested in prospective DBS radio applications as a method either
of reducing expenditures through their replacement of costly short-
wave transmission facilities or as a means of overriding the signal-
jamming efforts of foreign govemments. 61 Over the course of these
years, the focus of US foreign communication policy generally was
limited to maintaining America's scientific and technological leader-
ship, the internationalization of the AT&T monopoly, and little
more. 62 Established private and public sector interests dominated
the institutional parameters in which telesatellites and US foreign
communication policy developed. Rather than their direct control
over state policy, powerful vested interests (especially AT&T and the
DoD) directed history most effectively through their dominant roles
in constructing the core institutional, organizational and technological
mediators that in tum shaped the day-to-day imaginings of what
policy officials believed to be possible and impossible, feasible and
infeasible.

3.3 TOWARD 'OPEN SKIES' AND THE POLITICAL
FEASIBILITY OF DBS

In response to Comsat, and the distance-sensitive rates charged by the
AT&T -dominated domestic television transmission system, the ABC
television network filed an application with the FCC to develop its
own distribution telesatellite in March 1966. 63 This initiative marked
the beginning of a political struggle that eventually led to the end of
the Comsat monopoly. 64 In response to the ABC application, the
FCC initiated formal hearings to determine whether it should proceed
to license new telesatellite systems and, if so, how this should be
pursued. During these proceedings, die development of the GSO
and its impact on existing policy became a key issue. The Commun-
ications Satellite Act of 1962 was drafted at a time when only an
elliptical orbit and the Telstar system were technologically feasible. In
1962, the scale and cost of this type of system made Comsat appear to
many to be the most economically viable of options. However, with
the emergence of GSO technologies, cost efficient alternatives to a
single shared system became viable. 65
A formative development in the eventual re-regulation of telesatel-
lites and in shaping more general US foreign communication policy
was a federal task force on telecommunication policy established by