Page 76 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

64 Communication, Commerce and Power

At that time, one can anticipate a sudden awakening of American
interest in the communications satellites as educational and
propaganda tools in the developing parts of the world. 105

Despite its potential propaganda applications; its anticipated
technological and economic advantages; the emerging recognition, in
the words of one State Department official in 1976, that 'The
commercial export of information has a significant market poten-
tia1';106 and the growing politicization of international institutions
through LDC references to the 'threat' of direct broadcasting, US
foreign communication policy officials generally remained uninter-
ested.
These formative years were directly shaped by two overarching
interests. The first expressed the need to redress the much publicized
technological challenge mounted by the Soviet Union. The second was
an expression of the interests held by established telecommunications
companies, dominated by AT&T. These forces - the former primarily
driven by international security concerns and the latter by business
interests favoring the telecommunication states quo - delayed first
GSO and later DBS developments. Due to the priority needs of
both the Department of Defense and the fixed costs represented in
the AT&T monopoly, large-scale public sector investments into tele-
satellites initially were predicated on the needs of these vested inter-
ests.
Again, remarkable in their absence were concerns about the cul-
tural-power implications of telesatellites. Not only were such consid-
erations altogether secondary in this early period, but Congressional
acceptance of the new Comsat monopoly also involved a related lack
of knowledge about the capabilities of new telesatellite systems. Com-
sat was not just the product of entrenched interests dominating for-
mative debate, Congressional officials were to some extent reliant on
the 'expert' views of the very officials representing this status quo. In
other words, the newness and technological and economic complex-
ities featured in the hurried Communications Satellite Act debate were
not counter-balanced by the perspectives of critical public or private
sector agents - mostly because such agents either did not yet exist or
their arguments necessarily relied on unproved theorizations regard-
ing the viability and relative cost-effectiveness of GSO systems. Simi-
larly, the structural framework in which the cultural-power
implications of telesatellites could be fully assessed was also under-
developed.