Page 95 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

84 Communication, Commerce and Power

isolation regarding its free flow principles by claiming that the Amer-
ican constitutional protection of 'free speech' prohibited US state
officials from participating in any international agreement limiting
'the right to free expression. ' 41
Given the general lack of interest shown among most US public
and private sector officials in the commercial or propaganda-based
development of DBS, what were the substantive reasons for this
official American resistance to the international regulation of direct
broadcast applications? us officials had no interest in the establish-
ment of any legal precedent that could restrict the future ability of its
private or public sector to exploit the GSO and the radio frequency
spectrum fully. Given that an international agreement on how these
resources are put to use is an essential precondition to the stability
and reliability of telesatellite applications, and the emerging recogni-
tion that secure international telecommunications were becoming
more and more the essential prerequisites to international commercial
and military operations, the direct broadcasting issue - despite the
absence of foreseeable plans by core US interests to apply DBS -
constituted a direct challenge to future American power capacities.
Moreover, as will be discussed below, the international legal debates
that centered on the DBS issue, and the institutional prominence of
the UN and the ITU in mediating them, facilitated a remarkable
assertion of collective power by mostly less developed countries
against the aspirations of relatively developed nations in general and
the United States in particular. At least until the 1980s, unsolicited
transnational US-based DBS developments and other unilateral asser-
tions of American cultural power generally were sublimated in foreign
policy to the maintenance of status quo relations. Rather than analyz-
ing the DBS issue in terms of DBS capabilities and DBS interests
alone, therefore, the actions of US and foreign officials can only be
fully understood by keeping these contextual power issues in mind.
While legalistic conflicts over free flow principles versus prior con-
sent/state sovereignty rights remained unresolved, satellite broadcast-
ing technologies were being developed at a rate requiring some form
of ITU rule-making in order to prevent the possibility of chaos emer-
ging over the airwaves. In 1971, the Union's World Administrative
Radio Conference on Space Telecommunications (y.l ARC-ST) estab-
lished a process for countries to register frequencies that require
protection from prospective DBS signal interference. W ARC-ST
defined a 'broadcasting satellite service' (such as DBS) as a 'radio-
communication service in which signals transmitted or retransmitted