Does The U.S. Have a Global Communications Policy?

John M. Eger is the Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and Public Policy at San Diego State University. A telecommunications lawyer, he was advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Next month the United Nation's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will consider whether -- and if so, how -- it will assume the lead policy role for the future growth and development of the Internet. This includes assigning domain names and addresses and related technical matters discussed at two earlier UN conferences. While no decision affecting the way the U.S. -- mainly through its agreement with the southern California corporation called ICANN -- does business, that all is slowly but surely about to change.

As nations around the world awaken to the importance of creating a robust communications infrastructure, they will be less dependent and less willing to accept what has been considered a one-way flow of information and communications goods and services from the United States.  This undoubtedly places a greater burden on U.S. policy makers to pursue the basic idea of a free, unregulated, unrestricted flow of news, entertainment and information.  Clearly trade in information goods and services and the future of journalism itself face new challenges.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been a leading proponent of free trade in part because many countries are opposed to the importation of American films.  At the same time, of course, there is great concern over piracy of those same films.  Clearly while the government says and wants to do one thing, the worldwide consuming public wants another.  Television, which produces all forms of audiovisual materials, has run into the same nagging import restrictions, tariffs and administrative barriers to the free trade of information goods and services.

Just two years ago UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, adopted a treaty promoting or recognizing cultural identity. The MPAA among others in the industry opposed the U.S.'s support of the resolution.  The U.S. stood alone, along with Israel, in opposing the cultural treaty on the grounds that it would be used for trade purposes to block the importation of American information and entertainment products, which constitute a major percentage of U.S. exports.

This concern about the "free flow" of information across borders is certainly not new.  Most recently, in the late '70s and early '80s, the term "The New World Information Order" was part of the debate by the MacBride Commission -- named after Nobel Prize winner Sean MacBride, chairman of the panel -- whose concern, then as now, is that the current flow of information and communications heavily favored the U.S.  The developing countries were expressing their frustration with what they were calling a form of electronic colonialism with the U.S., indeed the Western world, dominating media flow. In protest, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, among other countries, withdrew from UNESCO in the '80s and rejoined just a few years ago.

Despite the concerns expressed by the McBride Commission report and the call for a New World Information Order, the report's concern with concentration and commercialization, and what it felt was unequal access to information and communications, has not changed significantly. The commission's call for a "strengthening of national media to avoid dependence on external sources" has had some success, and as noted earlier, many countries are now focusing on developing a robust communications media unique to their national economy and culture.

The concern with the U.S.'s dominance of media flow does not extend