For the last 30 years or so, the United States has been variously accused of cultural imperialism, electronic colonialism or information apartheid, and has been presented with a myriad of obstacles from national content restrictions, trade embargos on software, music and films and even so-called privacy protection schemes -- intended to reverse the flow of communication around the world -- to a 20-year effort by UNESCO to create a new treaty calling for a "free but balanced flow" of communications, goods and services.
Each time, the U.S. has managed to overcome such proposed barriers to the free flow of communications. Today, thanks to satellite technology and e-commerce, capitalism is clearly in triumph the world over. Most countries in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and in the southern hemisphere have permitted some form of commercial television. They have also deregulated their telephone and broadcast monopolies permitting some form of foreign investment and generally promoting international communications, all of which in turn have ushered in the new era of globalization.
Private-sector companies have made investments all over the world and now operate somewhat seamlessly producing global goods and services for worldwide consumption. Indeed, the difficulty for many governments is that the global corporations they expect to regulate or otherwise control are much larger than most governments. However, the corporations themselves are somewhat stateless and as a result national governments are losing their ability to control much of what happens within their jurisdictions. This has heightened the level of concern and frustration.
Now that broadcasting, cable and telephony have converged, and the economy is truly global, countries are awakening to the fact that there are no national economies anymore, but rather, as Kenichi Ohmae has put it "only a global economy" which no one is in charge of. Consequently, national political leaders are looking for ways to rein in the power and influence of global telecom and media providers as they promote their own Internet-based economy and play an increasingly larger role in shaping the policies of international organizations like the ITU and UNESCO.
The fight over ICANN at Tunis was only the beginning of that effort. It was in some ways perverse that the Internet, which is a product of our global age, cannot truly be regulated in the usual way and that regulators and policymakers are looking for some way to harness its growth and development. It is not surprising therefore that the idea of forming a special international agency to regulate ICANN has failed. But the desire to have a say in the development of global telecommunications policy and the development of our Internet world remains alive and well among international agencies, academics and policy makers. UNESCO is a prime example.
Just two months ago, UNESCO pushed a treaty promoting cultural diversity to a vote, leaving the U.S. standing alone opposing the convention, which most countries believed offered an antidote to cultural homogeneity. The U.S. however -- primarily goaded by the Motion Picture Association of America -- believed the convention would allow governments to control culture, and even provide the intellectual framework for a new era of censorship to block the flow of foreign films and other information products and services.
UNESCO, in preparation for the Tunis meeting, released a 150-page treatise called "Toward Knowledge Societies" advocating a worldwide development program based upon the idea that knowledge is in the public domain and should be shared by every society worldwide. While UNESCO acknowledges certain proprietary rights, it narrowly defines such intellectual property and instead argues that a new agenda needs to be established to promote the idea that knowledge, as a public asset should be universally accessible.
This UNESCO effort, like the convention in the past promoting cultural integrity, are to be applauded, but the U.S. economy is now heavily dependent upon the production, storage and transfer of knowledge or information itself, not the production of goods and services. Maintaining our prowess in the area of knowledge production and transfer is our livelihood and thus means jobs, dollars and enhancing the quality of life for Americans. We will not again, despite some union members' arguments, establish ourselves as a manufacturing Mecca. Forrester Research has already pointed out that we will lose 3.2 million jobs in the service economy alone and the University of California, Berkeley argues that up to 10 percent of service jobs will probably be lost to globalization.
To maintain our current standard of living and our most cherished basic freedoms, as well as our prominence in information technology in the world, we must focus on dramatically changing and enhancing our educational systems at every level to produce the most innovative, entrepreneurial and creative people possible.
Internationally, We must be proactive to keep open the channels of communications, promote the free flow of communications, and ensure that the barriers to trade and investment in information goods and services are removed. Most importantly, we must explore creative and enterprising ways both to promote the knowledge economy we have helped establish, and on a global scale, find ways to insure other nations enjoy a stake in the same bold future.
Our present nationalistic, go-it-alone approach will not serve us well.
John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Endowed Professor of Communications and Public Policy at SDSU, was director of The White House Office of Telecommunications Policy from 1974 to 1976.
