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Volume 11
Issue 2
July 2023


ARTICLE CONTENTS

 * Abstract
 * TELECOMMUNICATION, HEGEMONY, AND CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION
 * ITU, THE REIGN OF PUBLIC TELECOMMUNICATION ENTITIES, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
 * THE ‘OLD BOYS CLUB’: THE DEVELOPING WORLD AND THE ITU IN THE NEOCOLONIAL AGE
 * CHANGING PRODUCTION, CHANGING RULES: THE 1988 WORLD ADMINISTRATIVE TELEGRAPH
   AND TELEPHONE CONFERENCE (WARC-88)
 * ‘TOOLS FOR TRADE’: GATT, ITU AND TRADE IN BASIC AND ADVANCED
   TELECOMMUNICATIONS
 * CONCLUSION
 * Footnotes

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MONEY, MAGIC, AND MACHINES: INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION AND
LIBERALISATION OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS AND SERVICES (1970S–1990S)

Negar Mansouri
Negar Mansouri
PhD Candidate in International Law, Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva,
Switzerland. Email: negar.mansouri@graduateinstitute.ch
  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0602-6303
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London Review of International Law, Volume 11, Issue 2, July 2023, Pages
231–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrad011
Published:
12 August 2023

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   Negar Mansouri, Money, magic, and machines: International Telecommunication
   Union and liberalisation of telecommunications networks and services
   (1970s–1990s), London Review of International Law, Volume 11, Issue 2, July
   2023, Pages 231–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrad011
   
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ABSTRACT

This paper studies the liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services
in the last quarter of the twentieth century, focusing on the role that the
International Telecommunication Union played in creating the material, normative
and ideological foundations of the pro-market global telecommunications order.

Issue Section:
Symposium: The Multiple Materialisms of International Law



> With its emphasis on entrepreneurship and competition, neoliberalism
> [suggests] you can be anyone you wish to be, but a) you will have to pay for
> it (possibly over many years through debt repayments) and b) you will be
> tested against competitors. These two things are guaranteed, by legislation if
> necessary.1
> 
> Only time will tell, but if we are on the verge of a significant paradigm
> shift it is clear that it is only the world’s elite who will be able to
> participate in this new networked information economy … I fear that
> governments and the telecommunications industry are in danger of creating a
> global information-rich elite while condemning the rest of the planet to the
> information slums.2




TELECOMMUNICATION, HEGEMONY, AND CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION

International organisations are born into various hegemonic orders, and they
reconfigure the hegemony in different ways: some embody the system and its
rules, and some disrupt them. The International Telegraph Union, the predecessor
of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), was one such organisation
born into an order shaped by various forms of competition, and the colonial and
neo-colonial aspirations of corporations and states.3 Technology firms and
equipment manufacturers had a relative advantage thanks to their innovation and
revenue-generating capacity, while states controlled the territory where the
telecommunications infrastructure needed to be laid and they, of course,
possessed the regulatory power. Yet telecommunication had long been
conceptualised as a ‘utility’ and provided by public-owned entities, known as
Public Telecommunications Operators (PTOs) or Public Telegraph and Telephone
(PTT), in many parts of the world until the 1970s, when the rise of digital and
satellite technologies enhanced the technological and organisational capability
of the multinationals. Soon enough, new pro-market ideas, wrapped in notions of
‘freedom of information’, ‘information highways’, and the ‘global village’, came
to undermine the century-old consensus over the utility nature of telegraph and
telephone services. In the span of three decades, and despite resistance by the
new and developing countries, telecommunication networks and services were
re-conceptualised as a ‘commodity’, subject to ‘the cash nexus’.4 Gradually,
what was known as the ‘international telecommunication order’, underpinned by
functional cooperation, was succeeded by an ‘international trade order’ grounded
in concessions and market power.5

Information processing giants and large business users of telecommunications
joined hands with administrative-judicial apparatuses in and beyond the
industrialised world to lead a process of change in the rules and structures
governing global telecommunications, through international institutions such as
the ITU and the World Bank. Starting in the 1980s, the General Agreement on
Trade and Tariffs (GATT) Uruguay Round began laying the ideological and material
foundation for domino liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services.
New relations of property and exchange were defined, and new geographies of high
and low profit were generated. Soon, markets were integrated, civil servants
were replaced by businesspeople, utility users became consumers, and
telecommunications became an ‘item of civilisation’ that the neoliberal
individual must pay the full price for. As part of the ‘juridification’ of the
new order, the ITU’s International Telecommunication Regulations were revised in
1988. Some years later, state/society complexes in possession of 93 per cent of
telecommunication markets committed themselves to liberalisation and
deregulation under the 1994 GATS Annex on Telecommunication and the 1997 WTO
Agreement on Basic Telecommunications.6

Although institutions such as the World Bank and the GATT/WTO played a crucial
role in reconfiguring relations of production around telecommunications
networks, technical organisations such as the ITU became instrumental not only
to the commodification of telecommunications networks and services, but also to
what Kees van der Pijl calls ‘Socialisation’ (Vergesellschaftung), which refers
to the organisation of the social orders around the existing relations of
production.7 More specifically, the ITU helped create new markets in the new and
developing world in the 1960s and 1970s through its technical assistance
missions and world telecommunications exhibitions. In the face of the
liberalisation of telecommunications sectors in the industrialised world in the
1980s, the Union’s Secretariat played a crucial role in changing the rules
governing access and interoperability of networks. With the ascent of
competitive and liberal order in the 1990s, the Union helped create social
cohesion and ‘manage difference and inequality’ by de-politicising neoliberal
politics. It also directed developing countries to restructure their
telecommunications sectors and develop investment and property laws for their
telecommunications networks and services—or create their own ‘neoliberal
legalities’, to use Brabazon’s words.8

The story of the neoliberal turn in global telecommunication is part of the
histories of infrastructures that remain at the margins of international legal
enquiry. In a discipline where knowledge production is driven by ‘crises’—or
what is perceived as ‘disruption’ to the liberal world order—the everyday
‘governmentality’ of infrastructures often fails to attract scholarly
attention.9 Yet questions of democracy, human rights, armed conflicts, or trade
wars, amongst others, are all closely tied to infrastructures, and how power is
organised in and beyond them. Once we—as lawyers—get our hands dirty analysing
global production and production relations, we can see how the ‘“technical” in
technology is not independent of organisational forms, social relations and
responses, economic structures and finance, or the networks of enabling or
related or consequential technologies in which a particular technical practice
is located’.10 Liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services in the
last quarter of the twentieth century, in fact, paved the way for what appears
to be an irreversible state of corporate power over people. As Tarnoff has
recently noted, ‘[t]he growth of [telegraph and telephone] networks were guided
by a desire for power and profit … While the internet is more sophisticated than
its predecessors, it continues this tradition … The techlash is nothing if not a
belated reckoning with the legacies of privatisation’.11

The history of the neoliberal turn in global telecommunication is also a history
of the division of labour between different institutions in the broader global
capitalist expansion, whereby some institutions—both as actors and
arenas—finance and lead the reconfiguration of production relations, while
others make rules and culture to perpetuate the new order. Indeed, a thorough
understanding of commodification and socialisation in the global capitalist
expansion necessitates going beyond the familiar cases of financial
international institutions and development banks to investigate how technical or
commodity organisations engage in the creation of social cohesion under a
certain mode of production. This will also help understand the ways in which
ideas travel from one world institution to another, some institutions patronise
others, worldviews are transformed, new narratives are constructed, and some
policy preferences are juridified while others circulate and fade away without
affecting relations of production. Along these lines, contestation over and
retreat from institutional mandates—a central theme in international
institutional law—can be studied beyond questions of technicality and legal
interpretation, and more as the ‘logic of capital’ navigating through different
institutions with differing anatomies of influence.12

The article starts with a discussion of the balance of power in the post-1945
ITU, regulation of different technologies, and the pre-1970s hegemony of public
telecommunication entities in the global telecommunication order. It will then
discuss the question of ‘development’ in the ITU following the decolonisation of
Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, the challenge of the old order by the
new and developing world and the failure of the South to reconfigure the
relations of production. Following this, it explores the multiple forces behind
the neoliberal turn in the global telecommunication regime and the change in the
ITU’s International Telecommunication Regulations between the 1970s and 1980s.
The next part then discusses the World Bank’s advocacy of liberalisation of
telecommunications under its ‘new agenda’, the GATT/WTO trade negotiation and
the restructuring of the ITU in the 1990s. That part ends with a few words on
the changing role of the ITU Secretariat in the post-liberalisation period and
the importance of the managerial class (or ‘cadre stratum’) to capitalist
expansion. The following part concludes the piece.


ITU, THE REIGN OF PUBLIC TELECOMMUNICATION ENTITIES, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

The International Telegraph Union (IT), the predecessor of the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), was established by the initiative of the nephew
of Napoléon Bonaparte III of France, and as part of the broader European project
for ‘transition to industrial capitalism’ in and beyond the continent in the
late nineteenth century.13 The founding instrument of the IT, the International
Telegraph Convention, was adopted by 20 European countries in 1865.14 Although
the advantages of interconnections between telegraph networks played a role in
setting up the Union, it was ultimately the collective European consensus to
institutionalise the state monopoly over telecommunications networks and
services that justified the creation of an inter-state body. European countries
had already developed a complex network of bilateral and multilateral treaties
and regulations,15 and the Union was intended to act as an ‘international cartel
of national telegraph agencies’.16 As I will explain further, harmonisation of
codes, tariffs and operational procedures for international telegraph traffic
was an essential aspect of the monopolistic organisation of the sector.

Telephony remained outside the ambit of the Union until the 1880s, partly due to
its limited use and inadequate transboundary infrastructures at the time, but
also because telephony was seen by European post and telegraph administrations
as a threat to the telegraph markets they managed themselves.17 Soon enough,
however, the growing interest amongst European governments in international
telephone service led to the creation of a separate institution called the
International Consultative Committee on Long-Distance Telephony (CCIF) in Paris
in 1923. The CCIF was intended to facilitate expansion of telephone networks
beyond national borders through voluntary standards, as opposed to the treaties
set through the ITU to govern the telegraphy.18 In 1926, the CCIF was formally
brought under the aegis of the ITU but remained an autonomous body with its own
telephone laboratory in Paris until 1948, when the committee was integrated into
the ITU Secretariat.19

Following the invention of wireless telegraphy in 1876 and radio transmission of
human voice in 1902, a semi-autonomous entity named the International Radiograph
Union (IRU) was set up by a 1903 conference and at the initiative of Germany.
Radio transmission was by nature borderless, had historically been managed by
companies, such as British Marconi, the German Siemens and Telefunken and the
American Commercial Cable Company, and was coordinated through a transnational
network of agreements and physical stations. The idea that radio communication
could be managed by the ITU was not popular, although the IRU was practically
housed and staffed by the International Telegraph Union Bureau in Berne and many
principles governing international telegraphy had already been applied to radio
transmission. The First World War, however, changed the dynamics. With the
decline of military use after the end of the war, the commercial use of radio
frequencies unleashed new economic opportunities, but also coordination
problems.20 In 1932, only a few years before the start of the Second World War,
the IRU and the International Telegraph Union held two separate conferences in
Madrid while sharing their committees and plenary meetings. The meetings
resulted in the adoption of the International Telecommunication Convention,
which also became the founding instrument of the new International
Telecommunication Union (ITU).21

While the ITU institutionalised public-owned telecommunication in mainland
Europe, the organisation of telephony and telegraphy was different in the United
States and the United Kingdom. Due to the private ownership of their telegraph
networks, neither of the two countries became founding members of the
International Telegraph Union. The UK, however, joined the Union in 1868 when it
nationalised its domestic telegraph and to represent its interest in India.22
The 1868 Convention adopted by the Vienna Plenipotentiary Conference also made
it possible for companies to accede to the convention without being able to take
part in standard setting. Following a proposal put forth by Britain, the
conference also adopted ‘colonial voting’, enabling European governments to vote
on behalf of their colonies.23 Finally, the 1871–72 Rome Plenipotentiary
Conference allowed companies to attend the meetings without voting rights. The
US did not join the ITU Convention until 1934, when the new category of
‘Recognised Private Operating Entity’ (RPOA) was created. Even then, it opted
out of both the Radio Regulation and the Telephone and Telegraph Regulations
until 1949 and 1973 respectively.24 The RPOAs could gain ‘recognition’ only if
they provided service to all customers, and on a non-discriminatory basis.25

The US and the UK relied on telephone monopolies at home (AT&T and British
Telecom) but maintained different models of international telephone services
abroad. The British Empire’s telecommunication was organised by Cable & Wireless
Ltd and treated as ‘one end-to-end bloc’.26 The United States combined
‘protectionism of domestic markets with free market rhetoric’ and an end-to-end
model abroad.27 In the end-to-end model, the modalities for interconnection were
set by companies (and called ‘propriety standards’), as opposed to the ITU
model, where rules were set by states.28 Finally, in the realm of
inter-continental telegraph services, submarine cables across the world oceans
were controlled by a cartel of British private firms.29 Yet even telegraph was
subject to state control when penetrating national borders.

The key to understanding the ITU and how it organised cable telecommunications
(telephone and telegraph) and wireless technologies (radio and satellite
frequencies) in and beyond borders in the twentieth century is the three sets of
norms produced by different bodies of the Union during the century:
International Telecommunication Convention, International Telecommunication
Regulations (Radio Regulations or International Telephone and Telegraph
Regulations), and Recommendations. The ITU’s plenipotentiary conferences, held
at regular intervals,30 adopted broad principles governing telecommunication
services such as the right of the public to use telecommunications services, the
right of the governments to stop or suspend services and protection of physical
networks, all codified in the International Telecommunication Convention.31
Consensus—as opposed to voting—was the rule in plenipotentiary conference.
Reaching ‘consensus by exhaustion’32 had indeed turned plenary assemblies into a
‘forum for trading votes and symbolic politics’.33 In the intervals between the
conferences, the Council handled the affairs of the organisation.34 In parallel
with the plenipotentiary conferences, the World Administrative Telegraph and
Telegraph Conference (WATTC) and the World Administrative Radio Conference
(WARC) set ‘regulations’ governing radio, telephone, and telegraph. Telephone
and telegraph regulations, for example, contained rules on interconnection of
networks, qualification of services and tariffs.35 Radio regulations contained
technical rules on assigning and nomenclature of frequencies and preventing
interference.36

Eventually, the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) and the
Consultative Committee for International Telephony and Telegraphy (CCITT)
developed standards in the form of ‘recommendations’ which, although not
binding, were applied widely by ITU members and non-members.37 For example,
CCITT adopted recommendations on dialling procedures in international services
or power level of signalling pulses (published in large volumes and available to
telecommunication administrations for a fee), while CCIR recommendations dealt
with spectrum utilisation, terrestrial and satellite radio communication.38
Described as ‘miniature international organisations’, each committee had its own
director and functioned as a club of industrialised countries’ engineers and
experts.39 Standards and regulations were negotiated in the committees and state
delegates merely put their seal of approval on them. Apart from standard
setting, the CCITT was also the guardian of the bilateral agreements between
states on ‘accounting rates’ for international telephone and telegraph services.
The rates were agreed upon in the ITU’s monetary unit (gold Francs) up until
1971, when the US president Richard Nixon delinked the US Dollar from gold,
creating floating currency exchange rates.40

Finally, in the post-1945 era, the ITU was also responsible for recording the
specifications of satellite frequencies. Following the United States’ strategy
to secure frequency spectrums for its industrial and military use in the
post-war order, an expert body called the International Frequency Registration
Board (IFRB) was set up in 1947 and within the General Secretariat.41 The
board’s mandate was simply to receive the notices of new frequency occupancies
and review their compliance with already-established frequency assignments. This
system of spectrum management is a good example of how, despite the ‘federal’
structure of the ITU (different technologies being managed by independent
organs), the social conflicts around one technology significantly affected
others.42 In the 1970s, the developing world’s antagonism around the use of
satellite spectrum triggered demands for fair transfer of land-based
technologies from the industrialised to the poorer nations.

International law was key to both the pre-1970s hegemony of public
telecommunication and the neoliberal turn thereafter. At stake were rules
governing the interconnection and lease of networks, service delivery, the
obligation to provide universal access, and the resale of excess capacity,
amongst others.43 Under the ITU’s operational rules, members would be protected
against competition by each other’s PTOs or companies in their territories,
while leaving a space for ‘special arrangements’ between the consenting
states.44 The 1937 Madrid Constitution stipulated that ‘[t]he High Contracting
Parties respectively reserve the right of making separately, between them,
special arrangements of all kinds, on service points that are not of interest to
the generality of States …’.45 As I will explain in Part IV, it was in fact the
insertion of the ‘special arrangements’ clause from the ITU’s Constitution into
the ITU Convention in 1982 and the cascading effects it had on International
Telecommunication Regulations and the CCITT recommendations concerning the
interconnection between private networks that enabled the neoliberal turn in
global telecommunication.46

The ITU’s Secretariat itself has an unexplored history. The Union was
administered by the Swiss Postal Telegraph and Telephone in Bern until 1948,
although from 1932, the secretary general was elected by plenipotentiary
conferences. Following the incorporation of the Union in the UN System by the
1947 Atlantic City Plenipotentiary Conference, an independent secretariat was
set up in Geneva. The decision to move the Union’s headquarters was a compromise
between the US’ insistence on replacing the ITU with a new organisation or
moving the headquarters to New York—where American telecommunication companies
could exert direct control—and lobbying by the UK and mainland Europe to keep
the Union outside the US-led UN and in Europe.47 The new secretariat staffed by
independent international civil servants managed to build a new image and
identity around apolitical expertise, ‘a passion for creativity, a compulsion to
tinker, and a zest for change’.48

Figures 1, 2 and 3.

The ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland is composed of three separate but
interconnected buildings. The buildings seen in the lower left and lower right
were built under the direction of the Genevan architect André Bordigoni in 1962
and 1970 respectively. The latter was admired for having brought the ‘vertical
element’ to the international organisations landscape in Geneva. The building at
the top was built by Genevan architects Maurice Currat and Jean-Jacques Oberson
in 1999 and was intended to accommodate the growing number of ITU staff.49
Source: Fondation des immeubles pour les organisations internationals (FIPOI).

Open in new tabDownload slide

Yet, like many technical IOs, the ITU Secretariat was kept at bay by powerful
states for a long time. As late as 1973, Jacobson wrote, ‘[c]ommunications are
vital to the civil and military function of government. To lose control of them
is to surrender essential instrument of sovereignty … After more than a century
people still have a reluctance to create an organ affecting telecommunication
that would be beyond and possibly above states.’50 The ITU staff, nevertheless,
used various media, from the ITU telecommunication exhibitions to keynote
speeches and the organisation’s monthly newsletter, to convey their changing
politics from a statist to a liberal telecommunication order.

Figures 4, 5 and 6.

ITU Telecommunication Journal, from left to right: January 1947, January 1967,
and December 1970. Source: ITU.

Open in new tabDownload slide

As I will discuss in parts IV and V, the shift of regulatory power from states
to firms towards the end of the twentieth century and the need for mediation
between firms and developing countries by the ITU’s staff led to a
transformation in the Union’s institutional culture from a bureaucratic one
(shaped by the century-long interactions with public telecommunications
administrations) to a corporate one. Three successive ITU director generals in
the last quarter of the twentieth century, Mohamed Ezzedine Mili, Richard Butler
and Pekka Tarjanne, played an instrumental role in managing social conflicts in
the Union while channelling hegemonic preferences. A reading of the keynote
speeches, editorials, and communications of the ITU director generals from the
1960s through to the 1990s in the Union’s archives in Geneva offers a consistent
portrayal of technological development as inherently apolitical and universally
beneficial. In inaugural speeches of various conferences or world
telecommunications exhibitions, the director generals consistently invited
delegates to address their disagreements around different technologies through
diplomacy and urged telecommunication giants and financiers to contribute to the
transboundary expansion of networks and services, so that all nations could
benefit from the wonders of telecommunications.


THE ‘OLD BOYS CLUB’: THE DEVELOPING WORLD AND THE ITU IN THE NEOCOLONIAL AGE

Telecommunication and broadcasting have been among the most important means of
exercising power in the modern world. They have enabled states to solidify their
claims to and actual exercise of sovereignty. Mansell explains that ‘[t]he terms
and conditions of access to telecommunications services are instrumental in
determining who can participate fully in the social, cultural, political and
economic life of the society.’51 Telegraph, telephone, data transmission, radio
and satellites have been essential to capitalism’s ‘spatial fix’, the
integration of markets, and the making of the present global economy as we know
it.52 Submarine cables enabled colonial powers not only to establish and
maintain control over overseas territories but also to gather strategic
intelligence.53 Similarly, radio broadcasting has been essential to the Western
propaganda targeted at the Eastern bloc.54

Who owns and manages telecommunications networks and services has extensive
implications for the organisation of the social world. In
capital-intensive/high-technology infrastructures such as telecommunications,
economies of scale and the size of business operations play the primary role in
wealth production. The laying of telephone networks on land or launching a
satellite into geostationary orbit will be a good economic decision only if
there is guaranteed, vast and continuous demand for services offered through
costly networks.55 For a century, however, the opportunities for primitive
accumulation did not stop most states from taking charge of laying networks and
characterising telecommunication as a public service similar to roads and
hospitals. Telecommunication networks were historically built with tax money and
were seen as public infrastructure. Of course, services were provided in
exchange for fees and over time became ‘cash cows’ for associated services such
as postal services.56 Yet, with revenue-generation not being the primary
consideration, distant and rural areas had the chance to benefit from services
to which their taxes and labour had contributed. Equally important was
cross-subsidisation in the network, with long-distance and international
services subsidising local services, urban customers subsidising rural
customers, and businesses subsidising residential services—a fundamental
redistribution mechanism in the welfare state, and crucial to the aspirations of
the working class in emerging countries in Asia and Africa. In the post-1945
era, a consensus existed amongst international development agencies and the
nations that a strong state was key to egalitarian politics.57 The material
capability of public-owned telecommunication, the dominant conceptualisation of
telecommunication as a ‘utility’ and the institutionalisation of this production
model through the ITU had created a ‘hegemonic fit’, to borrow from Cox.58

In privately-owned telecommunication networks, on the other hand, companies can
choose where to lay their networks, what to charge and when to modernise those
networks. As business and urban users provide the beloved economies of scale,
rural and residential users, islands and territories with scattered population
or low network penetration risk being abandoned as burdens on the networks.59 In
principle, governments can set terms and conditions for the private management
of telecommunication as part of their national development plans. Yet, in a
world of competitive investment, poor nations must make their offer attractive
to foreign investors, sometimes by affording monopoly rights and, at other
times, by minimising regulations. While taking different forms, privatisation
eventually removes the management of telecommunication infrastructure from
public scrutiny.

For decolonised Asia and Africa, telecommunication and broadcasting were key to
nation-building, anti-colonial politics, and participation in the global
economy. Like other infrastructure, the development and density of
telecommunication networks in colonial territories followed the colonial powers’
business and strategic interests. Writing on the history of telecommunication
networks in India, Thomas explains that ‘[d]uring the colonial period, the
technologies of telegraph, cable, and wireless were stand-alone, and quite
crucially these technologies were not oriented towards its uses by ordinary
Indian citizens living in British India’.60 Giuntini has also studied Africa’s
telecommunication between 1850s and 1900s. He wrote: ‘war played a central role
in respect to the laying of the cables … In fact, much of the cables laid out
were the result of a conflict, which demanded a better communication for war
purposes. African submarine cables therefore did not result from a rational
industrial strategy or from a necessity to construct a coherent network’.61 As a
result, one of the first steps taken by post-colonial governments was ‘the
expulsion, censorship and nationalisation of existing Western news agencies and
the establishment of new state or semi-state equivalents’.62 Establishing
telecommunication networks in rural areas, where most of the population of
developing and least developed nations lived, could not only stimulate economic
growth but also buy loyalty for the central government. Ultimately, a
sustainable self-determination, and social mobility for that purpose, was not
seen as possible without public control over communication infrastructures.

Joining the UN system in 1947 and admitting an exponential number of new and
developing states in 1950s and 1960s, the ITU had to take a position on
technical assistance. The idea of development assistance as an overarching
policy governing the Union’s activities and funded by its budget was
unthinkable. Industrialised countries dominant in the ITU systematically opposed
any departure from the standard-setting functions of the Union. Seeing the Union
as ‘the old boys club’,63 many industrialised countries (including the Soviet
Union) opposed the allocation of any fraction of the budget to
telecommunications development in the South.64 Plenipotentiary conferences over
the two decades witnessed the consistent failure of proposals for a technical
assistance fund, a department within the Union to respond to the developing
countries’ needs, or regional offices in those countries.65 The post-war period
also coincided with a growing interest in the industrialised world for
‘upgrading domestic networks … introduction of electronic switching and the
complex standardisation that went with it’.66 The preference was to export
outdated equipment to the South as opposed to offering aid. What is more, the
‘federal’ structure of the Union, with Consultative Committees having their own
machineries, left little space to the new and developing countries to turn
processes of standardisation in their favour, despite such activities accounting
for 68 per cent of the Union’s budget.67 The technocratic/engineering culture
shaped by the telecommunication engineers and experts from the industrialised
world was, in fact, a strong force against any effective contestation of the
status quo.68 The Union eventually saw its role limited to modest technical
assistance—more in terms of technology transfer and management of
telecommunication networks funded through UN programmes, as opposed to the
establishment of telecommunication infrastructure and equipment in the
developing world.69

With the birth of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1965, the
UN budget for technical assistance in telecommunications grew 800 per cent by
1973, yet still remained at the negligible amount of USD 9 million.70 The ITU
was commissioned to direct 1825 expert missions and hosted 1399
telecommunication experts from new and developing countries.71 However,
piecemeal technical assistance activities, conducted along the lines of the
modernisation theory of the 1950s and 1960s,72 neither enhanced the material
capability of the South drastically nor disrupted the structural power of the
industrialised countries’ telecommunications giants over the South.73 The
majority of the projects were conducted by experts from Siemens, Ericsson, or
Thomson-CSF, amongst others, and a large proportion of the funds returned to the
industrialised world through the purchase of the equipment recommended by the
ITU’s experts. Frowned upon by the Soviet Union, the ITU had become a
‘marketplace’ for Europeans PTOs where they offered ‘favourable financing,
technical assistance, and on-site experts’.74 The missions also created a new
generation of telecommunication experts loyal to free-market ideology in the
developing countries: what some saw as the ITU leading a ‘transformismo’ which
made challenge by peripheral elites less likely.75

With market saturation in the industrialised world and the decline in profits
and investment by the end of the 1960s, the narrative of ‘entrepreneurial
government’—whereby a modern civilised state develops national infrastructures
by forging relations with multinationals—shaped the Secretariat’s approach
towards its large developing membership. In 1971 and under the direction of the
French-educated Tunisian telecommunication engineer Ebrahim Mili, the
secretariat started organising world telecommunication exhibitions (Telecom) to
bring together, on the one hand, the industrialised world’s multinationals,
PTOs, and financiers and, on the other hand, the developing world’s
telecommunication administrations. Organised in four-year intervals, TELECOMs
allowed the Union to transform its image from what Mili called a ‘small
organisation representing the PTTs curled up on itself’ to one that was ‘proud
of what it had achieved through this army of anonymous experts of the industrial
telecommunications companies’.76 For the first time, the Secretariat was allowed
to direct a regular and important initiative in any way that it saw fit and
successive director generals managed to build a whole institutional identity
around the TELECOMs. Combining the demonstration of state-of-art technologies
with ‘the usual array of celebratory and effusive accounts’,77 exhibitions
became a forum for telecommunications administrations from developing world to
search for foreign capital and companies from the industrialised world to
identify new markets.

Figure 7.

The main hall of the 1971 World Telecommunication Exhibition, ITU
Telecommunications Journal (October 1971). Source: ITU.

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They provided telecommunications companies of both traditional and emerging
technological powers with abundant market opportunities. As early as the first
exhibition, some companies reported that they were contacted by 80 per cent of
the delegations that visited the fair.78 Weber et al explain:

> the majority of the purchasing power of the telecommunication branch was
> present at these events, (potentially) resulting in an “alignment of
> interests” between sellers and buyers … Coordinating supply and demand on a
> global scale indeed required a comparison and evaluation of the market, and
> some of the stands were expressly designed to draw the attention of potential
> investors and interested professionals.79



Beyond enhancing the material capability of the North’s multinationals, world
telecom exhibitions reinforced a shared image of pro-market telecommunications
and laid the ground for institutionalisation of a new order in the years that
followed.

The secretariat’s insistence on ‘foreign capital and expertise’ as the cure to
the South’s telecommunications poverty also manifested itself in its monthly
newsletters, most vividly the August 1973 issue dedicated to technical
cooperation.80 Prepared for the 1973 Malaga-Torremolinos Plenipotentiary
Conference amidst the rise of the New International Economic Order (NIEO)
movement, the dossier started with Mili’s editorial where he spoke of a
transition from ‘technical assistance to technical cooperation’, to be
undertaken ‘on an equal footing’, and funded from ‘individual contributions’.81
Yet the dossier offered an apolitical account of corporations’ contribution to
the South’s social development, accompanied with anecdotes and images of
darker-skinned men and women learning about the magical world of
telecommunication machines from the experts of ‘more advanced countries’.82
Nevertheless, the ‘old boys club’ was no longer immune from contestation by the
developing world. It was eventually the relations of production around the
‘waves’ that triggered antagonism around land-based technologies in the ITU.

Figures 8, 9, and 10.

ITU Telecommunication Journal (August 1973). Source: ITU.

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The late 60s and early 70s witnessed the emergence of a new policy issue in the
ITU: the commercial use of satellite for telecommunications, made possible by
the positioning of satellite systems in the geostationary orbit (GEO). The
geostationary orbit (located 35,786 km above Earth’s surface) is a specifically
important orbit for telecommunications, as it moves at the same speed as the
Earth itself, allowing the satellite to remain in a fixed position relative to a
corresponding point of transmission on the Earth (antenna) for 24 hours and
without the need for the antenna to continuously track the satellite.

Famously, the USSR and USA were the pioneers. The USSR’s Sputnik and USA’s
Explorer 1 were launched into the space, respectively, in 1957 and 1958. The
first satellite to transmit voice signals was launched by the US’s Signal
Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment in December 1958. With the
establishment of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the same
year, a series of projects to develop satellite technology started.83 The
potential for mass commercial use created a strong incentive for the US
administrations to shape the path. In 1962, the US Congress set up the
Communication Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) as a private corporation and with a
monopoly over the conduct of commercial public telecommunication within the US.
Subsequently, Kennedy took the steps to globalise the commercial communication
by satellite as a way to ‘subordinate business considerations to promoting
certain political objectives’.84 He instigated the establishment of an
international agency to install and operate a global communication satellite
system. The first commercial satellite, known as Early Bird or Intelsat I, was
launched in April 1965 and delivered telecommunications and broadcasting
services in North America and Europe. Intelsat II was a series of four
communications satellite which were launched in July 1994 and covered the whole
globe. The International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (ITSO) was
established in 1971. The institution was set up by seven countries,85 as an
intergovernmental organisation in Washington DC,86 and by 1973, 74 nations
joined the treaty, and the name of the organisation was changed to INTELSAT.87

Circumventing the one-nation-one-vote ITU, Kennedy’s INTELSAT soon became an
exclusive club of existing and rising satellite powers, where investment shares
determined the voting power.88 The organisation of the space regime around
private capital had implications beyond space; it introduced a new generation of
conflicts over the shape of the global economic order. In Murphy’s words,
INTELSAT became ‘the vanguard of the globalised, co-operative world order that
actually took shape in the 1990s’.89 The terms of exploitation of space was
decided by INTELSAT, while ITU’s IFRB simply recorded the occupancies in its
Master Registrar.90 This was unacceptable to the new and developing world, as
the technologically advanced North could already congest and deplete the ‘scare
natural resource’ of GEO based on the liberal principle of ‘first come, first
served’, before the South could develop the infrastructure required for a
comparable use.91 The arguments in favour of squatter rights revolved around
neoclassical economics and the principle of efficiency and comparative
advantage. While satellite telecommunication could provide an important
alternative to the costly fixed telephone networks in the South’s rural and
distant areas, Europe and the US allocated between 30 and 50 per cent,
respectively, of the spectrum for their military use.92 Within the UN, a group
of equatorial state fought the laissez faire principles reinforced by the 1967
Outer Space Treaty in the UN, while the larger Group of 77 in the ITU called for
a priori planning of frequency spectrums.93

The ITU’s 1973 Plenipotentiary Conference, in Málaga Torremolinos, Spain,
authorised the IFRB for the first time to consider ‘equity’ (alongside
‘effective and economical use’) when furnishing advice on new frequency
allocations.94 Six years later, the 1979 World Administrative Radio Conference
(WARC) in Geneva institutionalised the ‘first-come, first served’ principle.
However, it adopted a resolution that called for the convocation of a world
conference to ‘guarantee in practice for all countries equitable access to the
geostationary satellite orbit and the frequency bands allocated to space
services’.95 Taking issue with the ITU’s possible authority on spectrum
management, the head of the US delegations to WARC-79 Glen Robinson wrote:
‘[t]he ITU is not an international FCC [the US Federal Communications
Commission] … In a capitalist society where most resources, public as well as
private, are distributed through the market, it seems strange to single out the
radio spectrum for such an objection’.96 Six years later, the 1985 World
Administrative Radio Conference on the use of the geostationary-satellite orbit
and the planning of the space services utilising it (WARC-ORB85) adopted a dual
planning method. Certain bands were subjected to an allotment plan to allow each
national administration to satisfy the requirements for their national services
from at least one orbital position within predetermined band(s).97 Although the
new allotment principles disrupted the reign of squatter rights in fixed
satellite system bands, the new principles did not have any effect on the other
seventeen space services and already-occupied orbital bands that could provide
low-cost/good-quality carrier orbits for the South’s telecommunication.

Famously, in the period between the mid-1970s and the 1980s, international
institutions became arenas for expert debates over the organisation of the
global economy in the ‘dialectic between capitalism and the alternative ways of
organising economic and political life’.98 With the growing material capability
of the new and developing world around raw materials and the solidification of
anti-systemic ideologies,99 they also took steps to reconfigure the relations of
production around telecommunication technologies. Unlike the ITU, the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was seen by
the developing world as an open platform for challenging the rules of global
communication and against the domination of multinationals such as Associated
Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Voice of America, British Broadcasting
Corporation, and Radio Free Europe, amongst others. The organisation had long
framed communication as essential to the South’s development and its culture was
in favor of the South’s demands for a New World Information Order (NWIO).100

In early 1974, the UNESCO Director-General René Maheu proposed a declaration on
the role of mass media in the world order: an overarching policy under which
future policy options could be laid. However, the clash between the US’
preference for the ‘free flow of information’ and the Soviet and Non-Aligned
Movement’s insistence on state-controlled media debilitated the process.
Instead, the 1974 General Conference adopted a resolution put forth by Sweden
for the ‘right to communicate’,101 which would in principle recognise the right
of the South to make its voice heard in the world communication and take the
steps in that direction. Nevertheless, the ‘rights’ language in the resolution
could be interpreted in a way that would shift the power from governments to
individuals. Two years later, the 1976 General Conference of UNESCO, held in
Nairobi, Kenya, established an international commission to study the problems of
communication. The UNESCO’s famous MacBride report, published in 1980,
questioned the industrialised world’s abuse of the ‘free information flow’
narrative to force an anti-democratic one-sided flow of information on the new
and developing countries.102 The report also took issue with the high
transmission tariffs putting small and peripheral states and users at a great
disadvantage in global politics.103 Despite these efforts, UNESCO could not do
the job of the ITU; its advocacy for an alternative communication order could
not go far without infrastructure and technology.

UNESCO’s report was followed by the famous ITU ‘Maitland Report’ or the ‘Missing
Link Report’, which attributed the South’s telecommunications poverty to both
the industrialised and developing countries.104 The report explained, ‘[t]here
are some 600 million telephones in the world. Of these, three-quarters are
concentrated in nine advanced industrialised countries … In a majority of
developing countries the telecommunications system is inadequate to sustain
essential services. In large tracts of territory there is no system at all.
Neither in the name of common humanity nor on grounds of common interest is such
a disparity acceptable’.105 The report recommended that developing countries
give higher priority to investment in telecommunication in their national
development plans, and that industrial countries would benefit from the
improvement and expansion of telecommunication networks in the South, since ‘new
or more extensive markets would be opened up for both high technology and
traditional telecommunications manufacturing industries’.106

Figure 11.

The 1985 Report of the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications
Development (Maitland Report). Source: ITU.

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The report proposed ‘separate, self-sustainable enterprise operated on business
lines’, laying the ideological grounds for telecommunication restructuring.107
While some expected the alarming data on the telecommunication divide in the
Maitland Report to become the ‘political hot potato’ of the decade, the South’s
vision of an alternative order failed to materialise and was soon rendered
obsolete by a new wave of neoliberal globalisation and the World Bank’s new
agenda.108

The World Bank started giving small loans to telecommunication projects in the
1950s. The Bank initially saw telecommunication as a luxury and its faith in
‘getting the prices right’ prevented it from including telecommunications in its
development agenda. However, the number of the Bank’s telecommunications loans
increased from a dozen in the 1950s to 93 by 1983 and to 125 by the end of the
1990s, with the share of such loans remaining between 1 and 2 per cent of the
Bank’s total lending throughout the decades.109 During Robert McNamara’s tenure,
poverty alleviation was an important aspect of the Bank’s strategy and,
therefore, the telecommunications loans were given without any specific policy
instructions. However, McNamara’s successor Alden Clausen was a full-fledged
advocate of foreign direct investment and speedy return on private investment in
the developing world.110 With the rising debt of developing countries and the
shrinking lending on the part of the Bank and its investors, structural
adjustment loans became the new lending strategy in the 1980s. By the end of
1980s, many of the telecommunication loans were given as part of a broader
structural adjustment plan, bringing Western investment banks, consultancy firms
and advertising agencies into the game.111 As I will discuss in the next part,
by the early 1990s, the Bank had begun to wage a war against public
telecommunication entities.


CHANGING PRODUCTION, CHANGING RULES: THE 1988 WORLD ADMINISTRATIVE TELEGRAPH AND
TELEPHONE CONFERENCE (WARC-88)

The 1970s were not only an era of growing material capability of transnational
business networks (in terms of access to capital, technological and
organisational capability) in and beyond telecommunications technologies, but
also a harbinger of changing ideologies and institutions. The marriage of
digital technologies—which themselves had emerged in the early years following
the Second World War—with telecommunications become the single most important
source of change.112 The move from analogue to digital transformed both
switching and transmission in telecommunication networks. The possibility of
transmitting data, image, and video—the so-called ‘enhanced services’—alongside
basic voice services generated new paths of wealth accumulation. A product of
the globalisation of the 1950s and 1960s, multinational corporations and large
telecommunication users became a strong force for liberalisation of networks and
services. Global productive and finance capital sought to expand the market for
new telecommunication services and equipment, while large users, airlines,
private banks and other financial institutions, and data processing giants such
as International Business Machines (IBM) and General Electric (GE) wanted a
liberal telecommunications order, beyond the ‘patchwork of disparate networks’
that they had already leased from public networks.113 Seeking more control over
their communications and diverse services at lower fees than what they had been
paying in a cross-subsidised national system, they launched a campaign for the
liberalisation of both international and domestic networks.114

By the mid-1970s, some European PTOs sought to contain the pressure for
liberalisation by collective upgrading of their networks through a
standardisation process called Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) within
the CCITT.115 However, by the time the CCITT project concluded, ISDN could at
best become only ‘one of many networks—public, private, intelligent or mobile—in
a multiservice environment’.116 Business users preferred end-to-end horizontal
networks and diverse services. They called the ISDN ‘Innovations Subscribers
Don’t Need’!117 In 1980, the United States requested the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Trade Committee to study trade
barriers in services. The OECD report, as well as another study carried out by
GATT, demonstrated good prospects for negotiation on trade in services.118 The
US Coalition of Service Industries, represented by Citibank, played a
substantial role in the process.119 International financial companies such as
Citicorp (Citibank’s holding company) and American Express, and value-added
service providers such as IBM or General Electric Information Services Company
were calling for a legally enforceable right to invest in national
telecommunications and were lobbying with governments to include services in the
Uruguay Round.120 Developing countries with some voice, such as India, Egypt,
Yugoslavia and Brazil, sought unsuccessfully to shift the negotiations on
investment issues to ‘the poor nations’ pressure group’, the UN Conference on
Trade and Development (UNCTAD).121

More broadly, the ascent of competitive telecommunication order materialised in
the context of the ‘post-industrial society’—underpinned by technology transfer,
foreign direct investment, and export-driven growth—and the broader integration
of the financial and productive capital starting in the mid-1970s.122 Urey
speaks of the ‘potential convergence of interests amongst those who control
telecommunications development and those who control capital market
development’.123 The advent of digital and satellite technologies in the cradle
of neoliberalism—the United States—had fundamental implications for the
organisation of the global telecommunication regime. Experiencing trade deficits
in different sectors, the American state/society complex had high hopes in
expanding the market for its economic strongholds: technology and services.124
The change was, indeed, ‘the product of particularly American business
interests, wrapped in a “Chicago economic ideology”’,125 and part of the broader
American search for structural power over knowledge.126 The US’ retreat from
liberal internationalism started with Nixon’s delinking the US dollar from gold
in 1971, and matured with Reagan’s withdrawal from the North-South negotiations
after the 1981 Cancun Summit. The US’ conservative administrative-judicial
apparatus, and soon other governments at the capitalist core, saw the cure to
high inflation in the North and the debt crisis in the South in favouring
multinationals and large users over their own workers, poor nations and,
ultimately, their monopoly private carriers.

The ‘first salvo’ against the ancien régime was fired by the US FCC in 1980,
when it unilaterally extended the US’ rules on resale and sharing of networks to
international services in violation of the consensus built into the CCITT
Recommendations for almost a century.127 The FCC also waged a successful
campaign on the ITU’s accounting rate system, which had allowed overseas PTOs to
exploit the revenues of international calls to fund local networks-and imposed
cost-based formulas.128 Four years later, as part of the incremental process of
promoting competition both in service provision and equipment manufacturing, the
US Department of Justice broke up the monopoly carrier AT&T, which soon set a
goal of making 50 per cent of its revenue outside the US by the 2000s.129 This
then increased the pressure on Europe to open its market in reciprocity.130
Following the US’ example, the Thatcher government privatised British Telecom in
1984. Soon a process of hegemonic integration into the Anglo-American ideal for
global telecommunications order started.131 Under US pressure, Japanese
telecommunications were liberalised in 1985,132 which then inspired the rest of
East Asia to do the same.133 In a move to synchronise their domestic economies
with the global economy, Latin American governments opened their
telecommunications networks—that they had nationalised a few decades earlier—to
foreign capital. Building upon the UK’s experience, the European Commission
started promoting a ‘competition strategy’ on the continent with the 1987 Green
Paper on the Development of the Common Market for Telecommunications Services
and Equipment.134 The commission also encouraged cooperation between the
Community members and non-European technology powers.

Solid steps towards juridification of pro-competition telecommunications were
taken with the revision of the ITU Telegraph and Telephone Regulation. Fearing
the total collapse of the old order and loss of revenues, Nordic and Japanese
PTOs had supported a resolution at the 1982 Plenipotentiary Conference in
Nairobi to study ‘proposals … for the new situation in the field of new
telecommunications services’.135 The 1982 Nairobi conference inserted the
‘special arrangements’ into the ITU Convention, which meant the regulations and
recommendations had to change as well.136 Two years later, the CCITT Plenary
Assembly set up a preparatory committee to draft necessary revisions to the
regulations to be reviewed by the 1988 WATTC in Melbourne, Australia. The
preparatory meetings reflected a new wave of the ‘monopoly versus competition’
debate in telephony and telegraphy. But what was exactly at stake?

The ITU regime was organised to institutionalise the statist model of
telecommunications and public telecommunications entities. For example, a 1927
CCIF Recommendation had mandated that ‘[i]nternational telephone communication
circuits should not be lent for a given relation unless the number of circuits
serving this relation makes it feasible; that … it should not be possible for
[central bureaus] to have the technical possibility of controlling the calls
exchanged; [t]he stations so linked cannot in any case be stations normally made
available to the public’.137 To respond to companies’ telecommunication needs,
the 1949 WATTC regulation had provided for the lease of telegraph circuits by
one company from another.138 However, inter-company resale of telephone circuits
remained prohibited. In a few years, the 1956 CCIF Recommendation would allow
‘multiple-user lease’ by different private entities engaging in the same
activity or in the same business. Yet, that recommendation banned connection to
public networks, imposed a surcharge on the leased traffic and mandated that
calls using leased circuits ‘must be concerned exclusively with the personal
affairs of the subscribers or those of their firms’.139 Companies also had to
pay above-cost rates to not only compensate for the infrastructures built with
tax money but also as part of the national welfare plans to cross-subsidise
services. In an act of de-formalisation, the 1973 World Administrative Telegraph
and Telephone Conference (WATTC-73) moved most of the binding regulations
governing the two technologies to the non-binding recommendations, providing the
multinationals with a ‘wedge with which to apply further pressure in the
future’.140 In response to pressure from the International Chamber of Commerce
(ICC) and the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), amongst
others, the CCITT allowed the interconnection of private networks upon
authorisation of public telecommunication administrations and if the
transmissions were exclusively concerned with the business activity for which
the circuit was leased.141 They wanted the new ITU regulations to head in the
same direction as the GATT negotiations on services.

The draft coming out of the WATTC-88 four Preparatory Committee meetings
favoured state control over telecommunication networks.142 Draft Article 1(7)
recognised the sovereign choice of member states to grant authorisation to
private entities using the international telecommunication network, and that
such entities should comply with the ITU regulations and if the Member State
sees fit also with the CCITT recommendations.143 This was seen by the proponents
of deregulation as an unacceptable move against the wave of liberalisation
underway in the industrialised world. The US and UK believed that the concern of
the ITU should only be interconnection and its legal, technological, and
economic aspects in the emerging competitive order.144 They had also managed to
gain the support of New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, and some other
countries. On the PTOs front, Sweden and Germany unsuccessfully attempted to
incorporate ‘the right to communication’ and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights into the regulations.145 The scramble for new markets amongst more
powerful developing countries such as India and Brazil prevented the formation
of a unified front. Soon the consensus on the instrumentality of public
telecommunication to economic growth started to crack.146

To prevent the US’ withdrawal from the Union in the months leading to WATTC-88,
the ITU Secretary General Richard Butler started mediating between the
proponents of both positions, producing an alternative draft, known as the
‘Butler Draft’. The draft was a major departure from the document adopted by the
preparatory committee. An American observer called Butler’s attitude
‘schizophrenic’, in the sense that he wished to portray ITU as supporting the
Uruguay Round negotiations, but he was also concerned about the overtake of
telecommunication by trade actors and the shrinking relevance of the ITU.147 The
draft eliminated article 1(7) of the PrepCom’s draft, replacing it with a
provision on the purpose of regulations as ‘promot[ing] the development and
efficient operation of technical facilities, as well as the efficiency,
usefulness, and availability to the public of international telecommunication
services, while recognising the sovereign right of each country to regulate its
telecommunication’.148 Article 4 of the Butler Draft on ‘the type of
telecommunication services covered by regulations’ removed the reference to the
CCITT recommendations and required members to only ‘promote the implementation
of international telecommunication services and endeavour to make such services
generally available to the public in their national networks’.149 This
essentially implied that there could be non-public telecommunication services
outside national networks.

In the face of disagreements, both article 1(7) from the PrepCom’s draft and the
consenting adult clause (article 9) were maintained in the revised regulation,
creating what many saw as a ‘neutral’ text, which fell short of fully revamping
the inter-state telecommunication order but laid the ground for deregulation
somewhere else.150 Article 9 recognised the sovereign rights of the member
states to break free the PTT-hegemony and open their networks to foreign
capital. The draft left the application of the CCITT recommendations to private
networks to member states. It recognised that provision of private services to
the public was the providers’ choice and made international rates
‘cost-based’.151 Nevertheless, a ‘framework of action’ with a certain material
and ideological configuration was emerging that could make anti-systemic moves
difficult. Drake explains that the new regulations reinforced ‘the ability of
new suppliers and users to conclude special arrangements for any type of
facilities and services as a presumptive baseline from which departures would
need to be justified … refusal to provide it to influential companies would now
be more difficult if PTTs could not hide behind a collective obligation to do
so’.152 Despite the major disadvantage that these sweeping changes entailed for
the developing and least developed states, no solid front was established. Their
proposals for recognition of the ‘economic harm’ of liberalisation in the draft
or inclusion of a clause to restrict private delivery of services to what public
telecommunications networks could not offer were both rejected.153 And of
course, with the statist telecommunication order? declining, the ITU had to be
given a new role, that of preaching liberalisation and assisting restructuring
in the developing world, interconnection, and interoperability of networks.154

In the competition game of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the European PTOs and
equipment manufacturers counted on their access to the continental market and
their former colonies in Asia and Africa. The US channelled its aspirations
through the World Bank and the ITU and Japan focused mainly on Asia and the
World Bank projects in the continent. The 1990s started in the World Bank with
Al Gore’s market-driven ‘Information Superhighways’ and the replacement of
Claussen with the US congressman Barber Connable. Under Connable, the Bank
departed from the poverty focus it had adopted during McNamara and ‘went hand in
hand with multinational business’—what Hills and Urey called ‘the new
agenda’.155 Under the new paradigm, the Bank integrated its telecommunications
staff into the vice presidency responsible for financial and private sector
development. It moved from the ITU to strengthen its partnership with the
private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, the International Finance
Corporation (IFC) which had itself established a new unit mandated to mobilise
capital for private investment in the South’s telecommunication.156 Soon enough,
the ITU saw its role as complementing the work of the Bank.

Equally influential was the Bank’s promotion of the ‘ideal’ telecommunication
order in its reports. The famous East Asian Miracle report attributed the
success of eight high performing Asian economies to high levels of domestic
savings resulting from state-controlled privatisation and their governments’
market-friendly approach.157 Funded by Japan, the report portrayed the
experience of a selected number of countries as the blueprint for development.
The Bank’s chief economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote some years later that ‘[t]he
IMF and the World Bank had almost consciously avoided studying the region … The
countries had been successful not only in spite of the fact that they had not
followed most of the dictates of the Washington Consensus, but because they had
not’.158 Many of the examples used in the report could at best be
‘counter-evidence’ for the Bank’s prescriptions. For instance, the report was
silent on why the liberalisation of telecommunication in New Zealand had
resulted in several litigations or how Singapore’s network intensity had
increased under state monopoly and not after liberalisation.159

The East Asian Miracle report was followed by a 1994 report called
Telecommunications Sector Reform in Asia: Towards a New Pragmatism arguing that
the governments in the South should take a ‘serve it or lose it’ approach.160 It
suggested that privatisation should be done not incrementally, ie, first value
added services, then satellite services, cellular and finally basic telephony,
but through a ‘bold initiative, one that makes a real break from the past’.161
Narratives around ‘closing the gap between supply and demand’ and ‘prospects of
cost-based rates’ were part of the broader portrayal of public telecommunication
entities as ‘bloated bureaucracies’ and civil servants as ‘unfit to run
telecommunication like a business’. Reliance on the market as a ‘governance
structure, on the other hand, could promote both allocative and technical
efficiency’.162

With the changing narratives, the ITU itself was seen as an overly bureaucratic
institution that was not up to pace with ‘the changing environment’. An
executive director of the Cable and Wireless wrote, ‘[w]ith the World Bank going
decisively one way, where does this leave the ITU, whose membership is Hedgehog
in the main?’.163 In the meantime, new regional standard-setting organisations
(RSOs), such as the Committee of the Exchange Carriers Standards Association in
the US, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the
Telecommunications Technology Committee (TTC) in Japan, had emerged. Set up by
industry actors, these organisations not only had a faster pace in
standardisation, they also did not have to bother with gaining the consensus of
the developing countries and the ‘old boys network’ populated by PTOs and ROAs,
as was the case in the ITU’s standardisation bodies.164

The 1989 Plenipotentiary Conference in Nice, France, had already launched the
restructuring of the ITU. Butler had set up an advisory group with members
ranging from the head of the US FCC and the presidents of American and British
consultancy firms to academics and directors of national PTOs. The report coming
out of the discussion advocated for a ‘clear separation of telecommunication
operations from government operations’.165 It also recommended the ITU to
streamline and rationalise its secretariats for ‘greater efficiency and improved
coordination’.166 The Union not only had to ‘to woo the private sector and make
it care what happens in Geneva’,167 but also act as ‘an agent of the
telecommunications sector of the World Bank’ and push developing countries in
the direction of restructuring their telecommunication sectors and creating new
property laws and foreign investment frameworks around their infrastructures.
Concluding in 1998, the restructuring extended the wide membership privileges
from the Recognised Operating Agencies (ROAs) to all telecommunication companies
and gave new standard-setting powers to private sector members in the CCITT
study groups.168 They were allowed to adopt certain recommendations without
formal consultation with Member States.169

The Union was restructured in three independent sectors: Telecommunication
Standardisation (ITU-T), Radiocommunication (ITU-R), and Telecommunication
Development (ITU-D), each with their own directors and bureau. The restructuring
insulated the regulatory and standard-setting mandate of the Union from the
demands of developing countries that were now given their own sector and were
expected not to drag questions of telecommunications poverty to other
sectors.170 The Development Sector was given a limited budget and staff and
assigned a business advisory group to furnish advice on investment options. In
parallel, the Secretariat started providing technical assistance to trade
negotiations. In a historical moment, the ITU’s Legal Symposium in October 1987
became a platform for launching the negotiations on legal aspects of trade in
telecommunication.171


‘TOOLS FOR TRADE’: GATT, ITU AND TRADE IN BASIC AND ADVANCED TELECOMMUNICATIONS

In April 1986, 25 OECD Member States expressed their resolve to include trade in
services in the upcoming Uruguay Round and negotiate the expansion of such trade
‘under conditions of transparency and progressive liberalisation’,172 and
against the wish of 23 developing countries. Liberalisation in the context of
telecommunication services meant interconnection and making public networks
available for use by foreign companies on a reasonable and non-discriminatory
basis. The Uruguay Round started in September 1986. A Group on Negotiation
Services (GNS) was set up to study the forms and extent of trade liberalisation
in various services sectors. Soon, it became clear that many nations would not
agree to full liberalisation of telecommunication services, and some preferred
separate sets of provisions on telecommunication.173

On the same day that WATTC-88 reached a compromise in Melbourne (ie, 9 December
1988), the Uruguay Round in Montreal reached a consensus over principles and
rules governing trade in services. Negotiation over specific sectors started in
1989 and lasted for five years. With lobbying from the US, the 1989 Nice
Plenipotentiary Convention elected the Finnish engineer and former minister of
transport and communication Pekka Tarjanne as the new Director General of the
ITU.174 Starting his tenure in 1990, Tarjanne pushed a narrative of
‘telecommunications as a tool for trade’,175 and made sure that the Secretariat
provided ‘low key’ but supportive assistance to the negotiations.176 The
application of the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status was particularly
contentious. Some states opposed its application to basic telecommunications and
others did not see a strong justification for excluding the principle.177 The
distinction between basic telephony and enhanced services came to the rescue. In
December 1990, a proposal was advanced to adopt an annex on enhanced
telecommunication services and another on continued negotiations on basic
telecommunications. The proposal was not accepted.

A year later, in December 1991, the GATT Director General Arthur Dunkel put
forth a new draft, known as the ‘Dunkel draft’, recognising the application of
the MFN principle to all service sectors. The draft also proposed a compromise
regarding basic telecommunications, namely a commitment by the negotiating
states to continue their negotiations on basic telecommunication. During the
1992 meeting, the US suggested an extension of two years, until 1994. A few
months later, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) committed the US,
Canada and Mexico, to ‘liberalise, as much as possible, trade in
telecommunications equipment and services among the three countries’.178 In the
course of one year, the three countries eliminated tariffs for 80 per cent of
telecommunication equipment.179 They were also required to guarantee access for
value added network (VAN) providers and companies to public networks and
interconnection on a non-discriminatory basis. Basic telecommunications were,
however, excluded. The formula was then exported into the Uruguay Round.

The 1994 GATS agreement coming out of the Uruguay Round negotiations in
Marrakech included an Annex on Telecommunications, which targeted value-added
telecommunication services, such as data, image, and video. The annex recognised
‘the specificities of the telecommunications services sector and, in particular,
its dual role as a distinct sector of economic activity and as the underlying
transport means for other economic activities’.180 It committed Member States to
afford access to ‘any service supplier of any other Member’ for the ‘use of
public telecommunications transport networks and services on reasonable and
non-discriminatory terms and conditions’.181 Foreign service providers were
given the right to ‘establish, construct, acquire, lease, operate, or supply
telecommunications transport networks or services’ in a member state’s territory
should they agree.182 Restrictions were allowed only to ensure the ‘technical
integrity of network’, as well as ‘security and confidentiality of messages’,
only if they were necessary and not just a disguise to influence the
competition.183 Basic telecommunication, ie voice telephony, was kept out of the
agreement. But not for long!

In Marrakech, the ministers also adopted the Decision on Negotiations on Basic
Telecommunications, which set a deadline of 30 April 1996 for reaching an
agreement on terms of trade in basic telecommunications. The Negotiating Group
on Basic Telecommunications drafted a Reference Paper on Regulatory Principles,
which included provisions on competitive safeguards, independence of regulators,
interconnection negotiations, licensing, and transparency. The group also
‘obtained market access offers to include basic telecommunications from 47
countries’.184 The US was still unconvinced as to the full opening of its basic
telecommunication market and asked for a higher number of commitments. A second
deadline was set, February 1997. On 15 February 1997, the WTO Agreement on Basic
Telecommunications opened ‘the biggest chunk of the global market’.185After nine
months of negotiations, 86 countries, accounting for 93 per cent of the global
telecommunication markets and a total value of USD 600 billion per year,
committed themselves to giving unrestricted access to their basic
telecommunications.186 The declaration adopted by Ministers in Singapore in 1996
read: ‘[w]e are determined to obtain a progressively higher level of
liberalisation in services on a mutually advantageous basis with appropriate
flexibility for individual developing country members … we look forward to full
MFN agreements based on improved market access commitments and national
treatment’.187

The Uruguay Round was the final episode of the subjection of telecommunication
to the discipline of capital. It brought to maturity the fit between the new
material capability of multinationals, the shared image of telecommunications as
a commodity, and juridified mechanisms to maintain the order. In a sharp move,
fifty-seven governments acceded to a reference paper that committed them to
putting in place competitive safeguards and providing access to markets ‘with
interconnection at any technically feasible point in the network’.188 Questions
of social policy and sovereign choice were not fully excluded. However, the
ascent of foreign direct investment created a ‘framework for action’, where the
limits of social welfare within and across borders were set by corporate
revenues and not the other way around. To borrow from Chimni, the ‘logic of
territory’ was subjected to the ‘logic of capital’.189

Liberalisation in the developing world took different forms.190 What they all
shared, however, was major income inequality and the disappearance of the middle
classes in the face of the recession of the 1980s and 1990s. With the value of
networks now being assessed based on the level of traffic, low-income countries
with low network density, countries with small populations, and islands became
unappealing to foreign capital.191 The new order was advertised as conducive to
‘competition’ and ‘an all-inclusive Information Society’. Yet, as Stiglitz
explained in a keynote speech at the FCC years later, networks proved to be
‘prone to non-competitive equilibrium’ due to sunk costs.192 Soon private
monopolies came into being in the developing world. Liberalisation of Latin
American telecommunications networks and the rising fees for residential users
led to customer protests from Chile and Argentina to Mexico and Venezuela.193
The ITU’s under-researched extension of deregulation and competition to the
African continent was viewed as ‘the death knell for public telecommunications
operators (OPT), African properties and treasures (in all senses of the term,
alas) [leading to] the gradual disappearance of public service’.194

Within countries, the distinction between basic and enhanced services generated
new sources of structural inequality; cellular mobile phones became luxury
products and low-income masses were viewed as undeserving of the upgrade to
‘enhanced services’. This was a reflection of what Cox called the North
‘generating its own internal South’ and the South forming ‘a thin layer of
society that is fully integrated into the economic North’.195 For example,
privatisation of British Telecom failed to lower prices or increase quality or
choice for non-business users.196 With the removal of cross-subsidies, local
telephone fees were increased to lower the costs for long-distance transmission
and make them more competitive. In India, the pressure from ‘well-organised and
articulate business groups’ led to the de-prioritisation of rural areas in
network expansion plans.197 In other words, the working population of the South
started to pay the telecommunication costs of their business elites. With the
trembling role of the state in development by the late 1990s, it was no longer
certain that separating the ‘regulator’ from the ‘service providers’—as
advocated by proponents of liberalization—could increase the density of networks
and quality of telecommunications services in poor communities.198

The neoliberal turn in global telecommunication took the ITU Secretariat beyond
its century-old role as a ‘penholder’, giving it a new agency and politics. This
meant a shift from the old bureaucratic mentality to a ‘cadre stratum’ spirit.
Van der Pijl explains: ‘[t]he ruling class cedes aspects of its rule to the
cadre stratum … the cadres effectively integrate the various moments of
alienation into an integral world of rules and norms, so that people subject to
the dislocating effects of commodification and exploitation are surrounded by
functionaries and organisations “taking care” of their drives, aspirations, and
fears’. 199 With the ascent of the trade regime, the ITU Secretariat needed a
full-fledged entrepreneurial spirit to promote ‘the ethical and moral rectitude
and rationality of the capitalist world market’.200 Under Tarjanne’s direction,
the Secretariat took up the moral leadership of neoliberal reform, encouraging
developing countries to create what he called ‘the right climate for outside
investment, liberalisation and deregulation’.201 Tarjanne saw a ‘catalytic role’
for the ITU,202 in which the Union would support regulatory initiatives in
low-income countries and act as a dynamic source of information on the market
status of developing telecommunication markets. With the fall of the Soviet
territories in Eastern Europe, he encouraged ‘new openness, new machineries of
management and operation … imaginative and dynamic policy consideration’.203 In
response to the question whether the ITU itself should be privatised, he
responded, ‘[w]hy not treat some of the ITU activities as if privatised … It
would be a good start!204 In the face of the widening telecommunications gap of
the 1990s, Tarjanne made sure to address the fears and antagonism and assure the
public about the prospects of competitive telecommunications. In an interview
with the Wall Street Journal in 1996, he said ‘[m]y worst nightmare is that, if
present market trend continues, the benefits of new technologies will not be
equally shared’, but ‘wise policies, based on new forms of cooperation between
the government and industry’ could help tackle the gap.205

Complementing the work of the World Bank and the WTO, the Secretariat and the
new Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D) became specifically responsible
for collecting market intelligence on the state of telecommunication markets and
helping developing countries create their own neoliberal legality.206 As Krever
explains, the law’s value in a neoliberal order ‘lies in its ability to provide
a stable investment environment and the predictability necessary for markets to
operate [to] reproduce and embed social relations of the free market and a
belief that development is predicated on individual entrepreneurial
activity’.207 By the late 1990s, the secretariat started organising the
Telecommunication Policy Forum, with technical, strategic, policy and legal
symposia, to promote more broadly the merging of telecommunication into trade.
In parallel, it financed training on development of regulatory frameworks for
liberalised markets.208


CONCLUSION

In a 2022 piece in New Left Review, Marco D’Eramo speaks of ‘America’s novel
mode of dominion—not taking territory, or siphoning off capital, but controlling
the networks and procedures that govern those territories and capitals, under
the norms of the Washington Consensus’.209 The domino liberalisation of
telecommunications networks and services in the last quarter of the twentieth
century manifested the ascent of a new hegemonic fit in line with the
Anglo-American ideal for organic organisation of production relations: one that
follows supply and demand and is structurally indifferent to social questions.
This ideal travelled across the industrialised world, from there to
international institutions, and soon extended to the rest of the world. Like any
other hegemonic order, no state/society complex was structurally barred from
imagining and materialising other ways of organising production. The change,
however, depended on how the existing productive and destructive potentials, and
the collective image of relations of production and institutions, could be
reconfigured in the service of alternative ideas.

Alongside international financial institutions and development banks, the ITU
played an important role in commodifying networks and services. The Union helped
create new markets for the industrialised world’s companies in the neo-colonial
era, and through its technical assistance missions and world telecommunications
exhibitions, it institutionalised a pro-market ideology amongst the new
generation of telecommunications experts in the developing world. Equally
important was the ITU’s role in the socialisation (Vergesellschaftung) process
inherent to the competitive and liberal telecommunications order. At a time when
the developing world had become alienated from the GATT, and with the UNCTAD
failing to challenge the structural forces of the global economy,210 the ITU
Secretariat became instrumental to the market socialisation of the 1970s through
the 1990s. More specifically, the Union’s Secretariat helped revise the
International Telegraph and Telephone Regulation, create new norms through the
GATT, assist the restructuring and regulatory developments in the developing
countries, and finally mitigate the anxieties generated by the growing disparity
in global telecommunications. The new structure of the ITU, with the development
sector being separated from the standards and radio sectors, was the last nail
in the coffin of the Union’s social policy for the developing world, and part of
the broader move to ‘kick away the ladder’ for the South nations.211

The history of the neoliberal turn in the global telecommunications, how it was
generated by broader forces in global relations of production, and the
implications it bore beyond networks and machines raises fundamental questions
about infrastructures, their ownership, and the role that (international) law
plays in solidifying or disrupting a certain configuration of production
relations. The unexplored histories of infrastructures (and logistics, one might
add) also require engaging with the past and present of technical international
organisations and their role in capitalism’s spatial fix. Ultimately, processes
of socialisation, such as setting new standards, de-politicisation, managing
externalities of production, communicating with the governed, making culture and
containing class antagonism, amongst others, are as inherent to the global
capitalist expansion as the hauling of nature and humans into the circuits of
production and exchange. Many histories to explore, many stories to write!

My gratitude goes to Laleh Khalili, Philip Grant, and Daniel R Quiroga
Villamarin for commenting on my previous drafts. I am also grateful to the two
anonymous reviewers for their rigorous review of my draft. Finally, I am
thankful to Geoff Gordon and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche for inviting me to
contribute to this Symposium. All URLs accessed 19 June 2023 unless stated
otherwise.


FOOTNOTES

1

W Davies, ‘The Difficulty of “Neoliberalism”’ Political Economy Research Center
Blog (1 January 2016)
<https://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/the-difficulty-of-neoliberalism/>.

2

C Blackman, ‘To Have and Have Not’ (1994) 18 Telecommunications Policy 3.

3

On the history of the International Telecommunication Union, see G Balbi and A
Fickers (eds), History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU):
Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter
2020).

4

K Van Der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations (Routledge
1998) 11.

5

W J Drake, ‘The Rise and Decline of the International Telecommunications Regime’
in C Marsden (ed), Regulating the Global Information Society (Routledge 2000)
125.

6

ibid 154.

7

Van Der Pijl (n 4) 16.

8

H Brabazon, ‘Introduction’ in H Brabazon (ed), Neoliberal Legality:
Understanding the Role of Law in the Neoliberal Project (Routledge 2018) 5.

9

H Charlesworth, ‘International Law: A Discipline of Crisis’ (2002) 65 Modern Law
Review 377.

10

B Kingsbury, ‘Infrastructure and InfraReg: On Rousing the International Law
“Wizards of Is”’ (2019) 8 Cambridge International Law Journal 171, 173.

11

B Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (Verso
2022) 12, 17 (emphasis added).

12

R W Cox and H K Jacobsen, The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in
International Organisation (Yale University Press 1974).

13

K Lee, Global Telecommunications Regulation: A Political Economy Perspective
(Pinter 1996) 58.

14

France, Austria, Baden, Denmark, Greece, Hanover, Italy, Saxony, Russia,
Prussia, Sweden-Norway, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Bavaria, Portugal, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and Württemberg.

15

K Aznavour, ‘The Price of Order: Technology, Diplomacy and the Formation of the
International Telegraph Union (ITU)’ (PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies 2014) 2.

16

J Hills, The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century
(University of Illinois Press 2010) 59.

17

Lee (n 13) 61.

18

P Genschel and R Werle, ‘From National Hierarchies to International
Standardisation: Modal Changes in the Governance of Telecommunication’ (1993) 13
Journal of Public Policy 203.

19

For a historical account of CCIF, see L Laborie and C Henrich-Franke,
‘Technology Taking Over Diplomacy? The “Comité Consultatif International (for)
Fernschreiben” (CCIF) and its Relationship to the ITU in the Early History of
Telephone Standardisation, 1923–1947’ in G Balbi and A Fickers (eds), History of
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): Transnational Techno-Diplomacy
from the Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter 2020) 265.

20

See M Rikitianskaia, ‘The International Radiotelegraph Union Over the Course of
World War I, 1912–1927’ in G Balbi and A Fickers (eds), History of the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU): Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from
the Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter 2020).

21

While concluding treaties and regulations concerning telegraph and telephony,
ITU did not set any technical standards until its restructuring by the 1947
Atlantic Plenipotentiary Conference.

22

Telegraph Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict c 88).

23

Lee (n 13) 60. On colonies’ voting rights at the ITU, see H Tworek, ‘A Union of
Nations or Administrations? Voting Rights, Representation, and Sovereignty at
the International Telecommunication Union in the 1930s’ in G Balbi and A Fickers
(eds), History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): Transnational
Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter 2020) 243.

24

J Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (University of Illinois Press 2007) 51.

25

Drake, ‘Rise and Decline’ (n 5) 132.

26

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 22.

27

ibid 11.

28

ibid 9.

29

See Hills, Struggle for Control (n 16) chapter 2.

30

The 1947 Atlantic City Plenipotentiary set the five-year intervals. Previously,
plenipotentiary conferences were held every seven years.

31

The 1875 St. Petersburg Conference simplified the convention by reducing
detailed provisions to some general regulations.

32

D J MacLean, ‘A New Departure for the ITU: An Inside View of the Kyoto
Plenipotentiary Conference’ (1995) 19 Telecommunications Policy 177, 178.

33

J Hills, ‘The Telecommunications Rich and Poor’ (1990) 12 Third World Quarterly
71, 87.

34

Previously, the Administrative Council.

35

The telephone and telegraph regulations were developed separately until 1988.
From 1988 forward, they were merged into the International Telecommunication
Regulations. See ITU, ‘Administrative Regulations Collection’
<https://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/RegulationsCollection.aspx>.

36

See, eg, Radio Regulations Annexed to the International Telecommunication
Convention (adopted 2 October 1947, entered into force 1 January 1949) 193 UNTS
188.

37

The CCIF (telephony) and CCIT (telegraph) were merged in 1956 and renamed the
CCITT.

38

For a full collection of ITU’s Telegraph, Telephone and Radio Regulations since
1965 (merged into International Telecommunication Regulation in 1988) see
<https://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/RegulationsCollection.aspx>.

39

See G Codding Jr and D Gallegos, ‘The ITU’s “Federal Structure” (1991) 15
Telecommunications Policy 351.

40

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 13–15.

41

S A Hook, ‘Allocation of the Radio Spectrum: Is the Sky the Limit?’ (1993) 3
Indiana International and Comparative Law Review 319.

42

On this, see, Codding and Gallegos (n 39) 351.

43

Successive conventions contained provisions on stoppage and suspension of
services: see International Telecommunication Convention (adopted 2 October
1947, entered into force 1 January 1949) 193 UNTS 188, arts 29 and 30 (Atlantic
City Convention).

44

Drake, ‘Rise and Decline’ (n 5) 134.

45

ibid.

46

International Telegraph and Telephone Regulations (adopted 9 December 1988,
entered into force 1 July 1990) art 9.

47

C Berth, ‘ITU, the Development Debate, and Technical Cooperation in the Global
South, 1950–1992’ in G Balbi and A Fickers (eds), History of the International
Telecommunication Union: Innovation and Diplomacy in Modern Europe (De Gruyter
2020) 77, 79

48

A B Masters, Cultural Influences on Public-Private Partnerships in Global
Governance (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) 38.

49

‘The ITU, Since 1865: The Emergence of a “Vertical Element”’ (International
Geneva)
<https://www.geneve-int.ch/architectural-history-international-organizations-geneva>.
The series is based on the book by Joëlle Kuntz, International Geneva: 100 Years
of Architecture (Viviane Lowe trans, Slatkine, 2017).

50

H K Jacobson, ‘ITU: A Potpourri of Bureaucrats and Industrialists’ in H K
Jacobson and R W Cox (eds), The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in
International Organisation (Yale University Press 1974) 59.

51

R Mansell, The New Telecommunications: A Political Economy of Network Evolution
(SAGE Publications 1994) x.

52

D Harvey, ‘Globalization and the “Spatial Fix”’ (2001) 3(2) geographische revue
23.

53

See B J Hunt, Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the
Victorian British Empire (Cambridge University Press 2021). See also P M
Kennedy, ‘Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870–1914’ (1971) 86
English Historical Review 728.

54

A R Johnson and R E Parta, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe (Central European University Press 2010).

55

See G Varrall, Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial
Success (Wiley 2012) 91.

56

J Straubhaar, ‘From PTT to Private: Liberalisation and Privatisation in Eastern
Europe and Third World’ in B Mody and J M Bauer (eds), Telecommunications
Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing
Countries (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1995) 3, 7.

57

B Mody and L-S Tsui, ‘The Changing Role of the State’ in J M Bauer et al (eds),
Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in
Developing Countries (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1995) 179.

58

R W Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations
Theory’ (1981) 10 Millennium 126.

59

Hills, ‘Telecommunications Rich and Poor’ (n 33) 71.

60

P N Thomas, Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India: A History
(Oxford University Press 2019) 304.

61

A Giuntini, ‘ITU, Submarine Cables and African Colonies, 1850s–1900s’ in G Balbi
and A Fickers (eds), History of the International Telecommunication Union:
Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter
2020) 37, 42.

62

J Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organisation and Politics
(1927–1992) (A Skinner trans Brill 2019) 58. This was not the case with Latin
American countries that following their independence in the early nineteenth
century gave monopoly concessions to foreign providers such as International
Telegraph and Telephone (ITT). However, these private monopolies were mostly
nationalised in the twentieth century.

63

G O Robinson, ‘Regulating International Airwaves: The 1979 WARC’ (1981) 21
Virginia Journal of International Law 1, 34. The term referred to the dominance
of industrialised nations in the ITU.

64

See J-L Renaud, ‘The Changing Dynamics of the International Telecommunications
Union: An Historical Analysis of Development Assistance’ (PhD Thesis, Michigan
State University 1986) (copy held at ITU Library and Archives, call number:
654(06) R395).

65

ibid 85.

66

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 145.

67

Renaud, ‘Changing Dynamics’ (n 64) 196.

68

See J-L Renaud, ‘The ITU and Development Assistance: North, South and the
Dynamics of the CCls’ (1987) 11 Telecommunications Policy 179.

69

Berth (n 47).

70

E Mili, ‘From Assistance to Cooperation’ (1973) 40 Telecommunication Journal
390.

71

Berth (n 47) 83.

72

J C Alexander, ‘Modern, Anti, Post and Neo’ (1995) 210 New Left Review 63, 67
(‘the social organisation and culture of specifically Western societies, which
were typified as individualistic, democratic, capitalist, scientific, secular,
and stable’).

73

See J Hills, ‘Dependency Theory and Its Relevance Today: International
Institutions in Telecommunications and Structural Power’ (1994) 20 Review of
International Studies 169.

74

Renaud, ‘Changing Dynamics’ (n 65) 64–65.

75

Lee (n 13) 143.

76

M Masmoudi, Mohamed Ezzedin Mili: Contribution to the Developement of World
Telecommunications (Hibiscus Editions 2013) 88 (emphasis added).

77

A C T Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
(Palgrave Macmillan 2010).

78

‘Message to XXIst Century: Telecom 71, 17–27 June 1971’ (1971) 38
Telecommunication Journal 683.

79

A-K Weber et al, ‘ITU Exhibitions in Switzerland: Displaying the “Big Family of
Telecommunications”, 1960s–1970s’ in G Balbi and A Fickers (eds) History of the
International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the
Telegraph to the Internet (De Gruyter 2020) 265, 274.

80

The 1973 issue can be found here: <https://historicjournals.itu.int/issues>.

81

Mili (n 70).

82

Berth (n 47) 89.

83

‘Development of Satellite Communication’, Britannica (online, last revised
2020).

84

S A Levy, ‘INTELSAT: Technology, Politics and the Transformation of a Regime’
(1975) 29 International Organisation 655, 659.

85

Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the US.

86

Agreement establishing Interim Arrangements for a Global Commercial
Communications Satellite System (adopted and entered into force 20 August 1954)
514 UNTS 25; Special Agreement (with annex) (adopted and entered into force 20
August 1954) 514 UNTS 25.

87

On INTELSAT, see G Reynolds and R Merges, Outer Space: Problems of Law And
Policy (Routledge 2019)

88

Hills, ‘Telecommunications Rich and Poor’ (n 33) 71.

89

C N Murphy, ‘Foreword: Communication and International Political Economy’ in E A
Comor (ed), The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony,
Telecommunication and the Information Economy (Palgrave MacMillan Press 1996)
vii.

90

See G A Codding, The Future Of Satellite Communications (Routledge 2019).

91

The principle was rooted in the broader concept of res nullius used by European
colonisers to appropriate what they characterised as ‘non-sovereign
territories’: Lee (n 13) 60.

92

P Cowhey and J D Aronson, ‘The ITU in Transition’ (1991) 15 Telecommunications
Journal 298, 308.

93

‘Declaration of the First Meeting of Equatorial Countries’ (3 December 1976)
(Bogotá Declaration).

94

International Telecommunication Convention (adopted 25 October 1973, entered
into force 1 January 1975) 1209 UNTS 32, art 10(3)(c) (Malaga-Torremolinos
Plenipotentiary).

95

Final Acts of the World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC-79) (signed 6
December 1979), Resolution No 1, Relating to Notification of Frequency
Assignments, and Resolution No 3, Relating to the Use of the
Geostationary-Satellite Orbit and to the Planning of Space Services Utilizing
It. On WARC-79, see T A Hart, ‘World Administrative Ratio Conference: A Review
of WARC-79 and Its Implications for the Development of Satellite Communications
Services’ (1980) 12 Lawyer of the Americas 442.

96

Robinson, ‘Regulating International Airwaves’ (n 63) 49.

97

Documents of the World Administrative Radio Conference on the Use of the
Geostationary-Satellite Orbit and the Planning of the Space Services Utilizing
it (WARC ORB-85, first session, 1985), Working Group 4C, ‘The Characteristics of
Typical In-Service Satellite Networks’ (13 August 1985) Doc No ORB-85/DL/6-E, 2.

98

C Murphy, Global Institutions, Marginalisation, and Development (Routledge 2005)
34–35.

99

See C Murphy, The Emergence of the NIEO Ideology (Routledge 1984); L Eslava et
al (eds), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and
Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press 2017).

100

See M Shamsuddin, ‘The New World Information Order’ (1987) 40 Pakistan Horizon
80, 85.

101

UNESCO, Records of the General Conference, Eighteenth Session, Paris, 17 October
to 23 November 1974, Volume 1: Resolutions, res 4.121(c)(iv).

102

International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, ‘Many Voices,
One World: Towards a New, More Just and More Efficient World Information and
Communication Order’ (UNESCO 1980).

103

ibid 257.

104

The Missing Link: Report of the Independent Commission for Worldwide
Telecommunications Development (International Telecommunication Union 1984).

105

ibid 3.

106

ibid 58 and 21. The Maitland Report also set up the Centre for
Telecommunications Development without allocating any funding to it. The Centre
started its operation in 1987, with a small staff and budget. As Cowhey and
Aronson explain, the Centre became a sort of ‘consulting firm’ with a small
amount of funding from private sector and the World Bank: (n 92) 309.

107

G Urey, ‘Infrastructure for Global Financial Integration: The Role of the World
Bank’ in B Mody et al (eds), Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control
of the Information Highway in Developing Countries (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Publishers 1995) 113.

108

J Solomon, ‘The Missing Link: A Political Hot Potato’ (1985) 9 Telecommunication
Policy 90.

109

A Barbu, ‘The Bank’s Experience in the Telecommunications Sector: An OED Review’
(Report no 12445, Operations Evaluation Department, World Bank 1993) 11

110

H Rowen, ‘Clausen Asks More Private Sector Aid’ Washington Post (27 February
1985) G5.

111

Urey, ‘Infrastructure for Global Financial Integration’ (n 107) 115.

112

See Mansell, The New Telecommunications (n 51).

113

D Schiller and R L Fregoso, ‘A Private View of the Digital World’ (1991) 15
Telecommunication Policy 195, 197.

114

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 9.

115

ISDN was an integrated national network with high-speed transmission capability
that could handle the traffic from different network models regardless of their
standards. CCIT Study Group for ISDN (XVIII) started in 1974 and completed in
1978.

116

Schiller and Fregoso (n 113) 207.

117

J Cioff, ‘Lighting Up Copper’ (2011) 49 IEEE Communications Magazine 30.

118

T L McLarty, ‘Liberalised Telecommunications Trade in the WTO: Implications for
Universal Service Policy’ (1998) 15 Federal Communications Law Journal 12.

119

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 180.

120

ibid.

121

J S Nye, ‘UNCTAD: Poor Nations’ Pressure Group’ in R W Cox and H K Jacobson
(eds), The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-Making in International Organisation
(Yale University Press 1974) 334.

122

See Y Masuda, The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society (Transactions
Publishers 1980).

123

G Urey, ‘Telecommunications and Global Capitalism’ in J Straubhaar et al (eds),
Infrastructure for Global Financial Integration: The Role of the World Bank
(Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1995) 53.

124

Lee (n 13) 101.

125

E M Noam, ‘The Public Telecommunications Network: A Concept in Transition’
(1987) 37 Journal of Communication 30.

126

S Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy
(Cambridge University Press 1998) xi.

127

W J Drake, ‘Global Private Networks and International Public Institutions:
Leased Circuits and the International Telecommunications Regime’ (Columbia
Institute for Tele-Information Working Paper No 513 1992).

128

D Walker, ‘International Accounting Rates’ (1996) 20 Telecommunications Policy
239.

129

McLarty (n 118) n 2.

130

W Hulsink, Privatisation and Liberalisation in Telecommunication: Comapring
Britain, The Netherlands and France (Routledge 1999).

131

See J Ratto-Nielsen, The International Telecommunications Regime: Domestic
Preferences and Regime Change (Lulu 2009); J Hills, Deregulating Telecoms:
Competition and Control in the United States, Japan and Britain (Praeger 1986).

132

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24).96.

133

See Hills, Deregulating Telecoms (n 131).

134

‘Green Paper on the Development of the Common Market for Telecommunications
Services and Equipment’ (Commission of the European Communities 1987). See, G
Natalicchi, Wiring Europe: Reshaping the European Telecommunications Regime
(Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2001).

135

International Telecommunication Convention (Nairobi, 1982), Resolution No 10,
‘World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference’.

136

Cowhey and Aronson (n 92) 301.

137

Comité Consultatif International des Communications Téléphoniques à grande
distance (CCIF), Assemblée Plénière de Côme, 5-12 Septembre 1927 (Paris: CCIF,
1927), pp. 117–19. Recommendation No. 13 on ‘Rental of international
communications circuits for the private service not including submarine
sections’, cited by Drake, ‘Global Private Networks’ (n 127) 13.

138

International Telecommunication Convention 1947 (n 43), Annex, Telegraph
Regulations 1949: Final Protocol to the Telegraph Regulations (signed 5 August
1949, entered into force 1 July 1950), Resolution No 9, ‘Lease of Telegraph
Circuits’.

139

International Telephone Consultative Committee (CCIF), XVIIIth Plenary Assembly
(3–14 December 1956), Recommendation 21, ‘Lease of International Communication
Channels for Private Service’, cited in Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n
24) 93. The provision was formalised into CCITT Recommendation D.1 in 1965.

140

Drake, ‘Global Private Networks’ (n 127) 11.

141

ibid.

142

W J Drake, ‘WATTC-88: Restructuring International Telecommunications
Regulations’ (1988) 12 Telecommunications Policy 217.

143

Draft Article 1(7) read: ‘Members shall endeavour to ensure that any entity
established in their territory, using the international telecommunication
network to provide international telecommunication services:a) is so authorised
by the member; b) complies with these regulations, and c) to the extent
considered appropriate by the Member complies with the relevant CCITT
Recommendations’.

144

Drake, ‘WATTC-88’ (n 142) 220.

145

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 98.

146

ibid 105.

147

R B Woodrow, ‘Tilting towards a Trade Regime: The ITU and the Uruguay Round
Services Negotiations’ (1991) 15 Telecommunications Policy 323.

148

Preparatory Committee/WATTC1988-Report R-4, CP/TT-R 4-E (May 1987) 14.

149

ibid art 4.1 (emphasis added).

150

ibid.

151

art 4 (3)(d) cited in Cowhey and Aronson (n 92) 306.

152

Drake, ‘Rise and Decline’ (n 5) 149.

153

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 109.

154

As articulated in art 1(3), cited in ibid.

155

Hills, ‘Telecommunications Rich and Poor’ (n 33) 71.

156

P A Stern and B Wellenius, Implementing Reforms in the Telecommunications
Sector: Lessons from Experience (World Bank 1994) ix.

157

N M Birdsall et al, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy: A
World Bank Policy Research Report (World Bank 1993).

158

J E Stiglitz, Globalisation and its’ Discontents (WW Norton and Company 2002)
91. See also A H Amsden, ‘Why Isn’t the Whole World Experimenting with the East
Asian Model to Develop?: Review of The East Asian Miracle’ (1994) 22 World
Development 627.

159

Urey, ‘Infrastructure for Global Financial Integration’ (n 107) 129.

160

P L Smith and G C Staple, Telecommunications Sector Reform in Asia: Toward a New
Pragmatism (World Bank Discussion Papers 1994) xiii.

161

ibid xvi.

162

ibid 7.

163

J Solomon, ‘The World Bank’s New Pragmatism: Telecommunications Reform in Asia’
(1994) 18 Telecommunications Policy 675 (emphasis added).

164

J Savage, ‘The High-Level Committee and the ITU in the 21st Century’ (1991) 15
Telecommunications Policy 365.

165

P Hansen et al, ‘The Changing Telecommunication Environment Policy:
Considerations for the Members of the ITU’ (Advisory Group on Telecommunication
Policy 1989) para 4.3.

166

ibid para 2.1.

167

Drake, ‘Rise and Decline’ (n 5) 156.

168

Instrument Amending the Convention of the International Telecommunication Union
(Geneva, 1992) as Amended by the Plenipotentiary Conference (Kyoto, 1994)
(adopted 6 November 1998, entered into force 1 January 2000) art 19.

169

ibid art 20.

170

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 126.

171

Woodrow (n 147) 329.

172

Ministerial Declaration on the Uruguay Round (20 December 1986) GATT MIN.DEC,
Part II.

173

Woodrow (n 147) 337.

174

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 124.

175

P Tarjanne, ‘Telecommunications for Users in the 90s: Tools for Trade’ (Keynote
address by the Secretary General of the ITU at World Telecommunication Seminar,
organized by International Communications Association and International
Telecommunications Users Group, Brussels, Belgium, 13 February 1990), copy held
at ITU Library Archives, unnumbered.

176

Woodrow (n 147) 341.

177

ibid 348.

178

I H Shefrin, ‘The North American Free Trade Agreement: Telecommunications in
Perspective’ (1993) 17 Telecommunications Policy 14, 14.

179

S K Black, Telecommunications Law in the Internet Age (Elsevier 2002) 165.

180

General Agreement on Trade in Services (adopted 15 April 1994, entered into
force 1 January 1995) 1869 UNTS 183, Part VI, Annex on Telecommunication, para 1
(objectives).

181

ibid para 5(a).

182

ibid para 2.

183

ibid para (d).

184

Black (n 179) 189.

185

Drake, ‘Rise and Decline’ (n 5) 156.

186

ibid.

187

World Trade Organisation, Singapore Ministerial Declaration (9–13 December 1996)
WTO Doc WT/MIN(96)/DEC para 17.

188

WTO Reference Paper: Negotiating Group on Basic Telecommunications (30 April
1996) WTO Doc S/NGBT/18 para 2.2.

189

B S Chimni, International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary
Approaches (2nd edn, Cambridge University Press 2017).

190

See B Mody et al (eds), Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of
the Information Highway in Developing Countries (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Publishers 1995).

191

See P C Symeou, ‘Does Smallness Affect the Liberalisation of Telecommunications?
The Case of Cyprus’ (2009) 33 Telecommunications Policy 215.

192

J E Stiglitz, ‘Engine for Growth: A Balance between Regulation and Unfettered
Markets’ (United States Federal Communication Commission 2004)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN1L2lqE5BY>.

193

S Rhodes, Social Movements and Free-Market Capitalism in Latin America
Telecommunications Privatisation and the Rise of Consumer Protest (SUNY Press
2006).

194

J-L Fullsack, ‘L’UIT, acteur déterminant dans l’évolution néolibérale du secteur
des télécommunications’ in D Benamrane et al (eds), Les télécommunications,
entre bien public et marchandise (Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer 2005) 347.
(‘l’UIT a sonné le glas des opérateurs publics de télécommunication (OPT)
africains, propriétés et trésors (dans tous les sens du terme, hélas) des États,
en même temps qu’elle a participé´ à l’effacement progressif du service
public’).

195

R W Cox, ‘The Crisis in World Order and the Challenge to International
Organisation’ (1994) 29 Cooperation and Conflict 99, 108.

196

See Blackman (n 2).

197

S D McDowell, ‘International Services Liberalisation and Indian
Telecommunications Policy’ in E A Comor (ed), The Global Political Economy of
Communication Hegemony, Telecommunication and the Information Economy (Palgrave
MacMillan 1996) 103.

198

See J Hills, ‘Liberalisation, Regulation and Development: Telecommunications’
(1998) 60 International Communication Gazette 459.

199

K Van Der Pijl (n 4) 138.

200

S Gill and A C Cutler, New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge
University Press 2014) 30.

201

‘Tarjanne’s Response to an Enquiry from a Colombian Researcher’ (13 December
1996). (copy held at ITU Library Archives, call number:
n\text\articles\colom.doc).

202

‘Message of Dr Pekka Tarjanne to the 16th Annual Pacific Telecommunications
Conference’ (4 July 1996) (copy held at ITU Library and Archives, call number:
IN/7/97).

203

Pekka Tarjanne, ‘Welcoming Remarks’, Policy Symposium: New Openness Throughout
Europe, Europa Telecom, (Budapest, 12 October 1992) available at
<https://www.itu.int/itudoc/osg/ptspeech/chron/1992/eupsym_ww2.doc>.

204

‘Minneapolis and the Future: Interview with Pekka Tarjanne, ITU
Secretary-General’ ITU News (no 8, October 1998) 7–10, available at
<https://search.itu.int/history/HistoryDigitalCollectionDocLibrary/4.16.57.en.101.pdf>.

205

P Tarjanne, ‘Electronic Communications Today-and Tomorrow’ (Interview with Wall
Street Journal, 14 September 1996) (copy held at ITU Library and Archives,
unnumbered).

206

P K McCormick, ‘Private Sector Influence in the International Telecommunication
Union’ (2007) 9 Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for
Telecommunications, Information, and Media 70, 77.

207

T Krever, ‘Law, Development, and Political Closure under Neoliberalism’ in H
Brabazon (ed), Neoliberal Legality: Understanding the Role of Law in the
Neoliberal Project (Routledge 2017) 22, 33–34.

208

Hills, Telecommunications and Empire (n 24) 132.

209

M D’Eramo, ‘American Decline’ (2002) 135 New Left Review 5, 12.

210

See Q Deforge and B Lemoine, ‘The Global South Debt Revolution That Wasn’t:
UNCTAD from Technocractic Activism to Technical Assistance’ in P Penet and J F
Zendejas (eds), Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from
Colonial Empires to Hegemony (Oxford University Press 2021).

211

H-J Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical
Perspective (Anthem Press 2002).


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