Page 77 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Te/esatellite Policy and DBS, 1962-1984 65

Although these early structures directly shaped the form and scope
of the Communications Satellite Act, the US military's need for
ongoing technological developments, coupled with demands by priv-
ate sector interests that they directly benefit from these expenditures,
set a contradictory process in motion. Despite the overwhelming
reliance on AT&T technologies, DoD and NASA contracts continued
to fund Hughes, RCA and other corporations in GSO and subsequent
DBS-related developments. AT&T interests seemingly were secured
through the construction of the Comsat monopoly and the recogni-
tion by the FCC that telesatellite developments were the regulatory
domain of the common carriers. However, allocations to manufac-
turers provided the seed money required to furnish the DoD and an
expanding range of corporations with new satellite-related techno-
logies and alternative services. Although the Soviet threat helped
forge the AT&T/Comsat monopoly, the same threat compelled the
American state to finance challenges to that monopoly - challenges
that first came about through GSO and rocketry advancements and
were subsequently developed through the attempt by television net-
works to bypass the AT&T domestic system.
With these challenges, the NAB emerged to lead domestic corporate
resistance to the kind of direct-to-home broadcasting developments
proposed by Sarnoff and others. Prospective DBS systems threatened
not just the economic viability of the television networks, they could
be used to undermine the capacity of local television and radio broad-
casters in order to exploit local markets. Just as GSO developments in
1962 constituted a high-risk and unwarranted expenditure in the
minds of AT&T executives, according to the rhetoric of the NAB in
the late 1960s, DBS purportedly had the potential to undermine the
'democratic fabric' of community-based broadcasting. Of course
behind such transparent arguments were monopoly or oligopoly inter-
ests, legitimized by the American state through the Rostow Commis-
sion and other agents and their pursuit of a rather biased
rapprochement. The new Nixon White House, carrying less of this
institutional baggage and spurred on by the emerging interests of
IBM and other non-carrier entities seeking to benefit from newly
converged telecommunication and computer technologies, possessed
enough political power and private sector support at least to challenge
the AT&T/Comsat monolith.
Both the introduction of the Open Skies policy and the broadening
use by businesses of communication and computer technologies
stimulated the subsequent direct involvement of an expanding range