The telecoms industry has a long history of having to cope with political worries and interference. State censorship, control and ownership have traditionally featured large in the telecoms industry. The aim has been control. In practice the telecoms sector has proved uncontrollable.
In the 19th century the Russian tsar declared a state monopoly over telegraph services in Finland, which was then under his control. Telephones, he decreed, were unimportant. Morse's telegraph, on the other hand, was crucial to national security. As a result, Finland soon had many hundreds of local telephone companies, many of which served as the bastions of Finnish nationalism. At the end of the second world war, there were over 700 telephone companies and today, despite mergers and rationalizations, there exist about 50.
That may be history, but there is more. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was marked by the central authorities in Moscow switching off connections to rebellious would-be independent states such as Lithuania and Georgia. In 1993 China banned satellite television dishes (they were, after all, capable of receiving uncensored broadcasts by such radical organizations as the BBC). In 1994 the US government tried, and failed, to introduce the Clipper encryption chip to allow it to have a security key to all traffic handled by electronic mail and the Internet.
The global telecoms network is incredible in its size and scope. By picking up the nearest telephone, you can call almost anyplace on earth. More than 1 billion telephones would ring if you know the right combination of ten or so numbers required to activate them. You can then talk to the person at the other end in a fair approximation of the conversation you would have if they were in the same room. If they have a computer, you can send them the complete works of Shakespeare in anything from a matter of minutes to a matter of days depending upon what analog or digital cord is strung between you.
So who owns this globe-encircling machine consisting of wires, fibers, satellites, radios, electrical devices, telephones and computers? The easy (and probably wrong) answer is governments. A more practical answer is the world's telephone companies. By the real answer is, increasingly, those who use it.
Like the creation of some B-movie professor, the telephone network has taken on an identity of its own which is in many respects beyond anyone's control. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the phenomenal development of the Internet. As befits a virtual world, the Internet can be regarded as a socially important "something" which, in terms of its physical shape and definition, is literally nothing. It does consist of real computers linked over the network of global networks, but it is impossible to point at something and say with absolute conviction "that is the Internet". Such intangible concepts are difficult for us to comprehend, not least the politicians charged with regulating telecoms. As a result, politicians are rarely equipped with the know-how to regulate sensibly. However, despite what the free spirits of the Internet community would have you believe, there is a key role to be played by governments and/or authorities in the evolution of telecoms, though that role may turn out to be the opposite of the one that they have been shaping for themselves.
