Chapter 10, detailed outline

The Politics of Global Communication





I- The three substantive domains

- The substantive domains of global communication politics encompass the fields of telecommunication, intellectual property rights, and mass media.

II- The beginnings

A- Telecommunication: International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the first treaty to deal with the world communication was adopted: The International Telegraphy Convention.

- The original text of the convention's treaty stated that the signatories desired to secure for their telegraphy traffic the advantages of simple and reduced tariffs, to improve the conditions of international telegraphy, and to establish a permanent cooperation among themselves while retaining their freedom of operation.

- Among the other norms adopted were the protection of the secrecy of correspondence, the right of all nations to use international telegraphy, and the rejection of all liability of international telegraphy services.

- The contracting parties also reserved the right to stop any transmission considered dangerous for state security or in violation of national laws, public order, or morals.
B- Intellectual Property Rights:

- The Berne treaty provided international recognition for the national treatment principle.

- In the development of author rights, the basic principles have been,
- To ensure remuneration for an author by protecting his or her work against reproduction.
- To demand respect for the individual integrity of the creator
- To encourage the development of the arts, literature, and science
- To promote a wider distribution of literary, artistic, and scientific works.

C- Mass Media:

- The positive, constructive contribution to the media to peaceful international relations generated considerable excitement.
- However, the negative social impact of the mass media was also a serious concern.

- A moral, educational concern was expressed regarding the spread of obscene publications across borders.

D- The new multilateral institutions:

- After 1945, global communication politics received a new movement through the establishment of the United Nations.

- The Un General Assembly has contributed to global communication politics through a vast number of resolutions that address such divergent issues as the jamming of broadcasts, the protection of journalists on dangerous missions, direct satellite broadcasting, and human rights aspects of science and technology.

- Among the various organs of the UN General Assembly, special attention for communication matters is located in the Third Committee of the General Assembly, and the Economic and Social Council.

- The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space became the focal point for the UN standard setting in outer space law, with important references to world communication politics through regulatory instruments addressing satellite broadcasting.

E- Specialized agencies:

- Multilateral policy is also made by the specialized agencies of the United Nations, and several of these became important regulators for the field of communication, especially the ITU.

F- The nongovernmental Organizations:

- In the post-1945 phase of the evolution of the world communication politics, an important contribution was offered by a rapidly growing group of international nongovernmental organizations.

- INGOs are partly international, in terms of membership and activities, and partly nationally based.

- They can influence the policymaking processes of the intergovernmental organizations as expert groups or as lobbying agents.

G- Shifts in Global Communication Politics:

- Today's global governance system to a large extent determines supranationally the space that national governments have for independent policy making.

- Global communication politics is increasingly defined by trade and market standards and ever less by political considerations.

- The most powerful private payers have become more overtly significant.

- The locus of policy making shifted form governments to associations of private business actors.

H- The World Trade Organization:

- The WTO was established as one of the outcomes of the GATT Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, completes in December1993.

- The WTO is generally more favorably to the trading interests of the major industrial countries than are other intergovernmental bodies.

- Among its main policy principles are the worldwide liberalization of markets and the nondiscrimination principle, which provides for national treatment of foreign competitors in national markets and for the treatment as most-favored nations.

- The rules of free trade are applied to the three main components of the world communications market: the manufacturing of hardware, the production and distribution of software, and the operation of networks and their services.

III- Current practices

A- The domain of telecommunication:

- The prevailing pattern of thought that guides global politics in relation to telecommunication infrastructures is based on the following assumptions:
- Telecommunication infrastructures are essential to development.
- The installation of the infrastructures is expensive.
- Private funding is needed.
- Countries have to liberalize their telecommunication markets and adopt pro-competition regulatory measures to attract private funding.

- Foe national and global telecommunication markets, the new policy implied privatization and liberalization.

- The key policy principles for global telecommunication are liberalization of the market and universal service.

- Liberalization can be defined as the opening of markets to competition; privatization refers to the transfer to state-owned institutions or assets to various degrees of private ownership.

- Governments pursue privatization and or liberalization policies for different reasons.

B- The WTO Telecommunication treaty:

- The basic telecommunication services are defined as follow:
- Public telecommunication transport service: any telecommunication transport service required by a member to be offered to the public generally.
- Public telecommunication transport network: The public telecommunication infrastructure that permits telecommunications between and among defined network termination points.

- Trade interests rather than sociocultural aspirations determine national telecommunication policy.

C- Changing the account rate settlement system:

- An important component of global communication politics is the so-called account rate system.

D- The Domain of Intellectual property rights:

- The essential governing institutions in the field of intellectual property rights are the World Intellectual Property Organization and the WTO.

- TRIPS contains the most important current rules on the protection of intellectual property rights. It is implemented within the WTO regulatory framework.

E- The domain of mass media:

- The main issues in relation to mass media concern concentration of ownership and the trade in media products.

- Oligopolization in the information industry may also undermine the civil and political fundamental right to freedom of expression.

- Oligropolists always have the tendency to use their market power to price gouge consumers. This means that access to information and culture becomes dependent upon the level pf disposable income.

- The contending positions are liberal-permissive claims versus protectionist restrictive claims.

- The liberal position prefers an arrangement that permits total liberalization of market access for media services.

- The more protectionist position favors levels of protection form media imports as instruments to support local media industries or to protect local culture.

IV- Lessons form a key project in the domain of global mass media politics

- During the 1970's, the new international information order (NIIO) was created.

- A new order that would be democratic, support economic development, enhance the international exchange of ideas, share knowledge among all the people of the world, and improve the quality of life.

- Among the various factors that contributed to the NIIO failure, the modt critical one was the lack of participation.


V- Global Communication Politics Today

A- Access:

- The neoliberal agenda perceives people primarily as consumers and aspires to provide them with access to communication infrastructure.

- The humanitarian agenda perceives people primarily as citizens and wants them to be sufficiently literate so than communication infrastructures can be used to promote democratic participation.

B- Knowledge:

- On the neoliberal agenda, knowledge is a commodity that can be processes and owned by private parties, and the property rights of knowledge producers should be strictly reinforced.

- On the humanitarian agenda, knowledge is a public good that cannot be privately appropriated.

C- Global Advertising:

- The neoliberal agenda has a strong interest in the expansion of global advertising.

- The humanitarian agenda is concerned about the ecological implications of the worldwide promotion of a consumer society.

D- Privacy:

- The neoliberal agenda has a strong interest in data mining: the systematic collection, storage, and processing of data about individuals to create client profiles for marketing purposes.

- The humanitarian agenda has a strong interest in the protection of people's privacy.

E- Intellectual Property Rights:

- The neoliberal agenda has a strong interest in the strict enforcement of a trade based system for the protection of intellectual property rights.

- This agenda has a strong interest in protecting the interests of communal property of cultural resources and in protecting resources in the public domain against their exploitation by private companies.



F- Trade in Culture:

- The neoliberal agenda has a strong interest in the application of the rules of international trade law to the export and import of cultural products.

- The humanitarian agenda is interested in exempting culture from trade provisions and in allowing national measures for the protection of cultural autonomy and local public space.

G- Concentration:

- The neoliberal agenda has a strong interest in creating business links with partners in order to consolidate controlling positions on the world market.

- The humanitarian agenda is concerned that today's global merger activities have negative consequences for both consumers and professionals in terms of diminishing diversity and creating the loss of professional autonomy.

H – The Commons:

- The neoliberal agenda wants to private exploitation of such commons as the airwaves.

- The humanitarian agenda wants to retain the public property of the human common heritage.