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Foreign Communication Policy and DBS: 1962-1984 87

limited and shared natural resource. In sum, however, the OST is too
vague a treaty on which to determine the legal status of DBS trans-
missions entering a country without prior consent. 53

4.3 US RESPONSES TO THE FREE FLOW IMBROGLIO

In the 1970s, US public and private sector free flow advocates, recog-
nizing the need for substantive legal arguments beyond references to
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
Constitution of the United States, initiated domestic research through
foundation grants, law school study programs, and more directly
through the US Department of State. In February 1974, for instance,
the State Department sponsored a conference in Virginia titled 'The
Free Exchange oflnformation and Ideas and the Integrity of National
Cultures.' Its 'Draft Work Statement' addressed four questions to be
dealt with by invited academics, lawyers and bureaucrats:
1 How well established in principle and in practice internationally is
the right to receive and impart information across national bor-
ders?;
2 Does the right to receive information and ideas apply more to
certain types of information and ideas than to others? For example,
is the right of a citizen of any country to receive cosmetics advertis-
ing from abroad equivalent to his or her right to receive debates by
the United Nations Security Council?
3 Does the practice of governments that impose controls on the
volume of imported information material, such as films and televi-
sion programs, violate the principle of 'free flow'?
4 What validity is there to the argument of some governments that
they must control foreign media that are assumed to have an
intense impact, such as television, as contrasted with media that
have less impact, such as shortwave radio? 54
Even when some of the more extreme opinions in response to these
questions are excluded, the conference and other such forums pro-
55
duced little agreement as to the legality of the free flow principle
relative to prior consent. But despite this, with no alternative
argument in hand, US officials continued to resist international
prior consent agreements using the free flow principle as their baseline
argument. In 1975, a study prepared for the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on DBS developments, updated in 1977,