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The United States and the Global Information Infrastructure: Orchestrator, Functionary, or Mediator?
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By ‘global information infrastructure’, I refer to the general technological and complementary regulatory framework through which information-based commodity activities are accommodated domestically and internationally.
Weber's much cited definition in which the state is the monopoly holder of legitimate violence within a given territory certainly constitutes a common denominator but it is not a useful base-point from which to conceptualise the state's role in the structural and policy developments addressed in this article.
For a thoughtful and critical discussion of these and other problems in defining the state, see Timothy Mitchell, ‘The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics’, American Political Science Review, 1991, 85, pp. 77–96.
As Mitchell has argued, “The power to regulate and control is not simply a capacity stored within the state. The apparent boundary of the state does not mark the limit of the processes of regulation. It is itself a product of those processes”—Ibid., p. 90.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 121–197.
For a summary of empirical evidence, see S.E. Siwek & H. Furchtgott-Roth, Copyright Industries in the US Economy, 1993 Perspective, International Intellectual Property Alliance, Washington, DC, 1993, pp. 8–10.
While from 1987 to 1992 the US trade surplus in services increased almost four-fold, reaching US$60.6 billion in 1992, the US trade deficit in goods was reduced from - $159.5 billion in 1987 to -$96.2 billion in 1992. As a result of the services surplus, in 1987 the US trade deficit was lowered by 8%, and in 1990 services exports reduced this by 36%. In 1992, the US trade deficit was reduced by 63% as a result of America's relative strength in services. See ibid., p. 13.
Al Gore & Ronald H. Brown, Global Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Cooperation, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1995.
Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research’, in P.B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer & T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 9.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 12.
Had the free flow of information become universally accepted in relation to the sovereign right of nation states to control domestic communications, the problems associated with its application remain manifold. Trade treaties, on the other hand, provide nation states with the capacity to employ potentially effective trade sanctions as means of enforcement.
Edward A. Comor, Communication, Commerce and Power, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, London and New York, 1998.
Joan Edelman Spero, Information: the policy void’, Foreign Policy, 48, 1982, p. 155.
William J. Drake & K. Nicolaidis, ‘Ideas, interests, and institutionalization: “Trade in Services” and the Uruguay Round’, International Organization, 46, 1992, p. 49.
Karl P. Sauvant, International Transactions in Services: The Politics of Transborder Data Flows. Westview, Boulder, CO, 1986, p. 199.
United States Department of Commerce, Long-Range Goals in International Telecommunications and Information, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Washington, DC, 1983; Jane Bortnick, ‘International telecommunications and information policy: selected issues for the 1980s’, report prepared for the United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1983.
Jonathan Solomon, ‘The ITU in a time of change’, Telecommunications Policy, 15, 1991, p. 375. Butler's successor, Pekka Tarjanne, carried forward these reforms, expressing a belief that technological and transnational corporate pressures compel the ITU to reform itself so as not to be a barrier to the changes taking place in the international economy. Telecommunications, according to Tarjanne, are as ‘tools for trade’. Quoted in R.B. Woodrow, ‘Tilting towards a trade regime’, Telecommunications Policy, 15, 1991, p. 333.
Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, Social Forces in the Making of History. Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 399–400.