Letter: Letters : Phone-for-all?

From Simon Fluendy

Hong Kong

So the deregulation of the phone industry is going to mean the world’s poor
will never get access to telecommunications. Instead, greedy multinationals will
get all the cash (“Hanging on for the phone”, 14 June, p 14).

Nice contrariness, but I don’t think so. First of all, the huge payments made
by the developed world to developing nations for accepting incoming
international calls have not been spent on infrastructure. This has been the
case since the 1930s and Lisa Sykes gave dramatic illustrations of the effect it
has had (phones per 100 people in Liberia: 0.2).

The US currently complains that about $5.5 billion a year is paid out
to places such as the Philippines. Infrastructure has only really started to be
built since the market was deregulated.

This payment should not be considered a subsidy by rich nations to poor ones:
it’s more like the old saying about the World Bank whereby poor people in rich
countries give money to rich ones in poor countries. That outpayment to the
Philippines doesn’t come because Wall Street fat cats are constantly ringing
Manila but because migrant or immigrant workers are calling home.

Actually, an international consortium is arguably more likely to wire the
villages—as Sykes points out, they can be compelled to roll out rural
lines in return for a licence. A state-owned monopoly has to fight for
government cash against a host of deserving causes like education and
hospitals.

Deregulation may leave us prey to multinational vultures but is it seriously
going to be worse than being prey to an inefficient and possibly corrupt
monopoly?