Jill Hills

The Internet: A Challenge to Public Service Broadcasting?

This article attempts to fill the gap in our understanding of the strategies that public service broadcasters are utilizing in relation to the Internet. It starts therefore from a discussion of corporate strategy and of branding. There then follows a survey of public service websites, their interactivity and content. It shows that the websites of public service broadcasters vary considerably. The article concludes that, by introducing a new set of competitors, the Internet is set to increase the commercial challenge to the legitimacy of public service broadcasting and has already begun to focus demands for another review of its role.

What's new? War, censorship and global transmission: from the telegraph to the internet

Perceptions of threats to national security have always been the basis for governments to enter the business of what, in 1900, was called ‘censorship’ of person to person communications and what, today, we call surveillance. The first direct intervention came during the Boer War in 1900, was expanded during the First World War and formed the basis of current policy. This article looks at the introduction of ‘censorship’ of electrical communications in time of war and compares the current position to the past. It concludes that the major differences between the early years of the telegraph and today are the invasiveness of the technologies and the international institutionalization of surveillance. Although some theorists have argued that the internationalization of communications has eroded the power of the state, the article concludes that power has shifted away from domestic and international non-state civic opposition groups to increased state control.

Liberalization, Regulation and Development Telecommunications

Markets are social and political constructs and regulation the means to their construction. The article considers why both regulation and telecommunications have been absent from mainstream development theory and looks at some of the practical difficulties of regulating telecoms in a number of low income and lower middle income countries.

Technological convergence: Regulatory competition. The British case of digital television

This article reviews British regulatory frameworks and market structure in the analogue television and telecommunications sectors, now converging in the technology of digital TV. In particular it points to the de facto monopoly of access to satellite analogue broadcasting by BSkyB and the impact that market structure has had on the negotiations for a new regulatory regime for digital television. It discusses the problems arising from the overlap of regulation as the technologies have converged and the approach of the British telecommunications regulator, Oftel, to the regulation of Conditional Access. It ends with the view that the case of digital TV may bring about an amalgamation in the separate regulatory institutions for the two sectors.

A global industrial policy. US hegemony and GATT. The liberalization of telecommunications

Abstract In the early 1980s the United States government was instrumental in entering the issue of liberalization of trade in services, and specifically liberalization of trade in telecommunications services onto the GATT agenda. Yet, in 1992 it reversed its policy and excluded basic telecommunications (voice transmission) from GATT. This article seeks to explain this change in policy, arguing that ten years on, because its activities in other international institutions have effectively allowed it to make the gains it originally sought, the US no longer needs GATT in the telecommunications sector.

Searching for universal access: the public interest, the FCC and the regulation of international telecommunications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at the way in which the “public interest” concept that was part of the US 1934 Communications Act has been defined and redefined in terms of international telecommunications over the 70 subsequent years.Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken in the paper is to use case studies from three periods – the 1940s, the 1960s and the 1990s – to examine the concept of the “public interest” used by the FCC and other US agencies in relation to international communications. The empirical data comes from primary and secondary sources.Findings – From the evidence of the case studies the paper concludes that the FCC has always been an international actor but has lacked a conceptualization of a division between domestic and international or of an international “public interest” that prioritizes the universal penetration of telecommunications. With the exception of the 1940s, US agency determination of the “public interest”, although often presented as benefiting US...