Disconnecting the British Empire and Reconnecting the Commonwealth Nations

This section traces the British, later all Commonwealth governments’ assumption of an international telecommunication policy as a tool of the state(s). In 1929, commercial carriers merged to form the monopoly company, Cable & Wireless, ostensibly to avoid competition between the two technologies of cable and wireless. The supercarrier remained in private hands, but the British government obtained the right to appoint one of two directors as well as the chairman of the Imperial Communications Advisory Committee (ICAC), which supervised the company’s service policy. To meet long-standing demands for greater participation in imperial affairs, the dominion and Indian governments appointed the remaining ICAC members.^{Footnote 10}

The Great Depression, however, prompted a dramatic drop in commercial messages and wiped out Cable & Wireless’ projected profits, which precluded the establishment of new connections. The lack of investment in the imperial network fueled dissatisfaction among the Empire’s periphery. To increase traffic within the Empire as cultural glue to lure back its composite parts, ICAC introduced a state-subsidized flat-rate scheme in 1937. Thus, the British state assumed the control over rate policy as well. Service and rate policy together were called imperial communications and established a regional network, closed off against foreign, primarily U.S., competition.^{Footnote 11}

These efforts were part of a global reform impulse to ameliorate the consequences of the Great Depression. The state(s) instead of market forces determined the price of international telecommunication rates. This move indicated “Britain’s New Deal” before the war emergency prompted economic planning, which was institutionalized after the war through the nationalization of core industries.^{Footnote 12}

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 increased yet again Commonwealth nations’ dissatisfaction with Cable & Wireless. Although enemy action barely damaged the company’s network, the steep increase of high-priority official messages delayed the transmission of commercial telegrams. News businesses and dominion governments pressured the metropole to end the obligation to relay all dispatches through London. The Australian press demanded a reliable wireless network, special cables for press traffic, and cheaper rates. Only independent networks could accommodate the “increasing importance of a freer flow of news, views and background between the different parts of the Empire.”^{Footnote 13} Cable & Wireless’ public clients from the U.S. Philippines, Dutch East India, and China openly voiced what Commonwealth representatives thought: Cable & Wireless should simply open up imperial communications and allow U.S. carriers to establish direct wireless circuits between them and the United States.^{Footnote 14}

In the face of mounting criticism, ICAC “felt powerless to withhold its consent.” Maintaining its commitment to imperial communications, ICAC’s Canadian chairman Campbell Stuart limited the admission of direct circuits to wartime and only for messages terminating in the United States. Now U.S. carriers could directly transmit messages from Sydney to San Francisco, yet still not from Sydney to Vancouver, without detouring via London. Despite its restriction to wartime, Edward Wilshaw, Cable & Wireless’ chairman, vehemently opposed direct links because they would herald the end of his company as “agents of Imperial Communications.” Wilshaw attributed the delays in the service to the flat-rate schemes of 1937 and the state’s wartime need for an extended and refurbished tap-proof cable network. The company could redirect investments into increasing the network’s capacity after the war.^{Footnote 15} According to Wilshaw, liberalization constituted a sinister “attempt on the part of foreign interests to secure and increase share in the control and operation of world communications.”^{Footnote 16} He also warned that “New York would inevitably tend to usurp London’s present position as the hub of the communications world.”^{Footnote 17}

The British government did not heed Wilshaw’s protest. The ICAC allowed U.S. carriers to establish the first direct shortwave link without relay through London between Australia and the United States on December 16, 1941, a mere nine days after the Japanese attack on the U.S. base in Pearl Harbor.^{Footnote 18} One month later, the ICAC ruled that its agreement with Cable & Wireless did not confer “monopolistic rights” to the company. It only denoted a “moral” but not a legal commitment to imperial communications. Thus, the U.S. military and carriers established further direct links connecting the United States to India, South Africa, and New Zealand. By the end of the war, a wireless network connected the United States to points in all Commonwealth states and British colonies.^{Footnote 19}

The periphery’s vociferous criticism of Cable & Wireless only thinly veiled their wishes to run their own affairs, including telecommunications. Even dependent British colonials used the interallied process of decision-making to pursue this goal. Girja Shankar Bajpai, the “General Agent” of the still-unofficial Indian representation in Washington, D.C., attempted to purchase equipment for two radio stations “operated independently” by Indian authorities to communicate with the United States. At first, he asked for a license with the British Purchasing Commission, which organized armaments purchases for the Empire in the United States. Since ICAC decided service policy, the commission refused. Then Bajpai turned to the U.S. Defense Communications Board, ICAC’s U.S. counterpart. In his application, Bajpai downplayed the number of stations in India. The board knew about them all and deemed their capacity sufficient. Bajpai had to agree. He maintained, however, that the existing stations, operated by Cable & Wireless, were insufficient for “propaganda purposes.” German and Japanese stations’ stronger signals rendered Indian broadcasts unintelligible. Bajpai used the direct-link policy established only for the Allied cause to bolster India’s national interest in broadcasting capacities.^{Footnote 20}

Bajpai’s attempt at self-determination for India was part of a larger reform movement. Ostensibly meeting to discuss delays in transmitting press messages, ICAC representatives called for a conference to revise the 1937 imperial rate agreement before its expiration.^{Footnote 21} At first, London balked. Thus, the Australian prime minister, John Curtin, invited the dominions and India not to an imperial but to a Commonwealth Telegraph Conference in Canberra in the fall of 1942.^{Footnote 22} Faced with the periphery going alone, the British government agreed to send a representative to Canberra and ordered the introduction of the one-penny-per-word rate for press messages in October 1941. This highly subsidized rate prevented the Commonwealth’s secession in telecommunication in Canberra. A cheap rate, however, did not increase network capacity. Delegates in Canberra continued to complain about Cable & Wireless’ clogged network and even warned of an imminent Americanization of the Commonwealth news market marked by a steep increase of U.S. news. Ironically, this stemmed from the dominions’ own call for the direct-link policy.^{Footnote 23}

Against this background, the Canberra Conference decided to reform imperial into Commonwealth communications. The Canberra demands, according to the Canadian ICAC chairman Campbell Stuart, heralded the onset of a “new quality of Empire relationship, which at long last triumphed over the hard-dying body of London control.”^{Footnote 24} The ICAC was renamed the Commonwealth Communications Council (CCC). Its members had to reside in their respective states instead of London. Furthermore, the Canberra delegates dismissed routing all traffic through London and demanded the right to license links independently.^{Footnote 25} The British government at first refused to heed these demands. Cable & Wireless had even refused to send a representative, which Stuart called “an embarrassment.” Edward Wilshaw outright rejected the Canberra proposals.^{Footnote 26}

Undeterred, Australia, New Zealand, and Stuart drafted the Anzac plan in April 1944. The plan proposed splitting up and nationalizing the assets of Cable & Wireless within the Commonwealth and Indian territories.^{Footnote 27} Again, the company and the British government dismissed the plan as “wholly inacceptable.”^{Footnote 28} Instead, they offered to create a single Empire corporation under a royal charter. This patched-up version of the Cable & Wireless merger would leave the company intact and merely elevate CCC representatives to directors of the company board.^{Footnote 29}

Sensing a middle ground, Ernest Fisk, the chairman of the Australian Amalgamated Wireless, suggested a compromise. Assuming a “unity of thought and ideals and more similarity of methods of government” within the Commonwealth, its governments should agree to “ensure that London will continue to be an important center for British world-wide news services.”^{Footnote 30} The commercial prowess of U.S. information and telecommunication providers, CCC members agreed, would have a “disastrous effect on British export trade, employment, purchasing power and standard of living.” If the specter of a seemingly unstoppable flood of U.S. information had served earlier to back up demands for a greater independence from London, it now rationalized the reform of imperial communications.^{Footnote 31}

The British government accepted Fisk’s outreach and, for the first time in imperial history, dispatched Lord Reith on a tour of the Commonwealth in early 1945. Reith was not only a Cable & Wireless board member, but also manager of the BBC and the Ministry of Information.^{Footnote 32} As Reith arrived in Australia, Prime Minister Curtin defended him against critics in Parliament asking for even more self-determination. He proclaimed that “if everybody is to take a purely national view, then goodnight to hopes of peace leagues of nations security confraternity and all the rest of it. Nothing but bloody tanks and guns.”^{Footnote 33}

Following the example of the nationalization of core industries in Britain after Attlee’s election as prime minister, Reith and Curtin hammered out a plan to finalize telecommunication reform. The Commonwealth nations bought out Cable & Wireless’ assets within their territories and nationalized them as public utility corporations. The company continued to operate “oceanic assets” supervised by the ICAC’s successor, the CCC.^{Footnote 34} After Edward Wilshaw made his last vain stand for the Empire, each Commonwealth representative took his turn to attack Cable & Wireless. In the end, they agreed to implement Curtin and Reith’s compromise.^{Footnote 35} In mid-July 1945, the Commonwealth Telecommunication Conference officially morphed from imperial into Commonwealth communications.^{Footnote 36}

Assessing the outcome of this conference, historian Daniel Headrick concluded that imperial communications “was disintegrating along with the empire it had served.”^{Footnote 37} Although the demise of Empire is certainly undeniable, Commonwealth communications merely devolved power from the metropole to the periphery. The reform, in fact, renewed the cohesion among dominions, India, and Britain. It retained a large voting bloc as a tool to defend the Commonwealth against U.S. hegemony. But why did the Commonwealth fear its most important wartime ally and its vision for international communications so much?

Freedom of Communication: A New Deal for the World or the United States?

This section scrutinizes how U.S. agencies employed telecommunication policy as a tool of the state in response to both market failures under the Great Depression and the implementation of British imperial communications. Freedom of communication served as a metaphor to reform international telecommunication regulation. Like U.S. conceptualization of human rights, the idea of freedom of communication drew on a globalized New Deal agenda.^{Footnote 38} The reform impulse, however, was not exceptional to the United States, as Daniel T. Rodgers has noted for transatlantic social reform.^{Footnote 39} Similarly, the postwar Bretton Woods system, for instance, owed much to the League of Nations’ international economic and financial cooperation.^{Footnote 40}

Between 1919 and 1939, however, the U.S. state and carriers remained firmly committed to the cosmopolitan business model in telecommunication to determine rates and services beyond borders.^{Footnote 41} Only after 1927 did the state impose minimal regulation on U.S. telecommunication providers inside and outside the United States. Little changed as president Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded the U.S. Congress to increase the scope of the Federal Radio Commission and transfer its powers to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934. The FCC remained an extension of the broadcasting industry. Its commissioners acted as mere traffic cops policing the allocation of frequencies to avoid chaotic interferences as more and more radio stations went on air.^{Footnote 42} Furthermore, the State Department, rather than the FCC, represented private U.S. carriers’ wishes in international telecommunication regulation.^{Footnote 43} This changed as the United States plunged into its second recession in 1937. Roosevelt and his advisers blamed big business. To encourage competition, break up monopolies, and lower the prices for consumers, the president brought the New Deal to telecommunications. The president appointed James Lawrence Fly, former general counsel to the flagship New Deal project, the Tennessee Valley Authority, as the new FCC chairman in 1939. Domestically, the FCC challenged the broadcasting industry’s perception of frequencies as their private property, but failed to even attempt to radically alter the U.S. media system.^{Footnote 44}

Internationally, however, Fly developed and implemented a radical vision based on Cordell Hull’s free-trade model to “free [the] development of international communications.”^{Footnote 45} In response to the 1929 Wall Street Crash, U.S. businesses had recalled credits and Congress had erected tariff walls around the United States. Other states had replied in kind, turning the U.S. recession into the Great Depression. To prevent future tariff wars, Hull’s Reciprocal Trade Agreements of 1934 had modernized the open-door policy and extended reciprocal U.S. tariff and quota reduction to any country willing to enter the deal. A growing number of bilateral tariff reductions developed into a multilateral liberalized world market with the United States as the hub of world trade.^{Footnote 46}

Fly adapted this model into the FCC’s guideline for external affairs. He insisted that “we must have free ingress and egress of information and freedom for all peoples of the world to communicate with each other.”^{Footnote 47} As long as capital costs and rates for telecommunication services remained high, he argued, businesses would form cartels and governments would use subsidies to skew the flow of information for commercial or political purposes. Instead, an international agency would supersede national policies and determine and enforce the lowest possible international rates. Cheaper rates, Fly expected, would increase traffic and offset losses. New Dealers considered commercial profits in information irrelevant because they constituted more than just an internationally traded good. A press rate, for instance, should be fixed even below cost-effectiveness to stimulate a “greater flow of news” to “promote understanding between nations.” Fly imagined the global telecommunication network as a global public space, where peoples could speak to each other as if living in a local face-to-face community. Instead of an intergovernmental diplomacy, political debates among peoples would defuse international crises and maintain postwar stability. Telecommunications would democratize international relations.^{Footnote 48}

To implement this vision, the FCC first assumed regulatory control over U.S. carrier’s international communications. Similar to imperial communications, one option was to merge all U.S. carriers operating international lines into a massive monopoly company under governmental supervision. If states opposed liberalization, a U.S. monster carrier would simply impose its own rules and standards by sheer market dominance. Representatives of most U.S. carriers and Congress, however, continued to insist on the free interplay of market forces.^{Footnote 49} This competitive outlook, as communications scholars Pike and Winseck argue, prevented the merger more effectively than any antitrust law. Merger talk was a bargaining chip for U.S. regulators to force carriers and foreign states to agree to freedom of communication.^{Footnote 50}

Instead, the U.S. entry into the war enabled an unprecedented degree of collaboration between state and industry. A “military–information–communication complex” emerged.^{Footnote 51} Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt established the Defense Communications Board to mobilize telecommunication. It consisted of representatives from the FCC, Army, Navy, State Department, the Treasury, and the Industry Advisory Committee, which organized the managers of the leading carriers. This public-private board organized U.S. telecommunication against enemy attacks, for use of propaganda, and instituted censorship at the source. It was the rough equivalent to the British ICAC or its successor, CCC. Since Fly presided over the board, the FCC obtained a decisive tool to pursue implementing freedom of communication.^{Footnote 52}

The board fixed quotas for each carrier based on the international traffic carried in 1942, benefitting primarily the more expensive cable companies. It also limited and controlled the points of entry and exit for wireless messages to three cities: New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. This ended competition between carriers and forced them to exchange international messages into domestic networks. Ostensibly to ensure censorship of information related to the war effort, this measure was ordered for the time of emergency only, but it remained in force until the 1980s and de facto severed domestic from foreign links. Later, the FCC prohibited U.S. carriers from negotiating services and rates with foreign states without an FCC license. In March 1943, President Roosevelt amended the Communications Act, codifying the FCC’s powers over rate and service policy and thus its regulatory control over U.S. carriers outside U.S. territory.^{Footnote 53}

The FCC liberally licensed wireless carriers to establish direct links to Commonwealth states. Although restricted to wartime, U.S. officials never intended to dismantle these circuits. A member of the Board of War Communications postulated that “the essence of [the U.S.] objective” as implementing the “principle of [direct] communication with various points of the British Empire.”^{Footnote 54} Reporting back from negotiations with his British colleagues in 1942, Fly maintained that “if the circuits are once established for the period of the war, they should be continued on a permanent basis.”^{Footnote 55} As the British government requested the installation of U.S. radio transmitters as backup for British cables within the imperial network, FCC engineers refused, arguing that existing cables were sufficient. If the delivery on credit was to be granted despite the lack of urgent needs, the Defense Board demanded as collateral not only the land leased to the United States for military bases, but also the permission to retain communication “with points throughout the British Empire” after the war.^{Footnote 56}

New Dealers not only pried open the imperial network, but also targeted preferential rates for messages transmitted within the British Empire. The Washington Post gave the example of the city of Melbourne seeking to buy lumber for a municipal housing project on the world market. A Canadian company from Vancouver and a Seattle-based U.S. firm made two competing telegraphic bids. Vancouver’s messages would have cost $90 due to the imperial flat rate and Seattle’s bid $147. To end British subsidies, Adolf A. Berle, U.S. assistant secretary of state, and Fly threatened to order U.S. carriers to undercut Cable & Wireless’s rates and start a price war.^{Footnote 57} Similarly, U.S. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, member of a congressional committee to study international communications in early 1944, admonished London for charging rates several times higher for the U.S. press than British equivalents.^{Footnote 58} In his testimony to the committee, Fly maintained that U.S. carriers—the only ones not on the verge of bankruptcy—could not compete, because London routing still “impos[ed] handicaps in time and cost.” According to U.S. reformers, state-subsidized networks skewed the content of news and hampered the “full and free distribution of news among nations.”^{Footnote 59}

After the Allied victory seemed imminent in late 1944, the FCC followed through with the threat of a price war. It ordered U.S. carriers to reduce their rates for services to the Western Hemisphere. Affected states, some of them adherents to international conventions prohibiting unilateral rate cutting, had to acquiesce or be cut off from the global network. Since the FCC’s rates undercut those of Cable & Wireless, “British” traffic was diverted to U.S. networks. Western Union had earlier agreed to share traffic with Cable & Wireless in the area and protested, but the FCC merely ordered the company to block all British traffic in the Americas. Outraged, the Foreign Office complained about the FCC’s rate dictation and even threatened to question any bilateral business contract.^{Footnote 60} Yet the UK had no legal handle against the FCCs “cut-throat competition.” International legislation had never factored in antagonistic policies such as those of the FCC “crusaders.” In fact, the British unwittingly enabled the FCC by legalizing bilateral or regional reciprocal rate reductions during the 1938 ITU Conference. Intended to enable the intra-imperial flat-rate scheme, it ironically also enabled the FCC’s unilateral rate reductions. As a British expert realized, they had now “to restrain the practices we ourselves started.” Thus, an agreement to ensure British imperial communications enabled U.S. reformers to reframe the global telecommunications system.^{Footnote 61}

Shortly thereafter, James L. Fly stumbled over his domestic enemies and resigned exasperated from the FCC in late 1944.^{Footnote 62} Although he left of his own accord, a British diplomat gloatingly reported that U.S. Congress finally set out to “clip Mr. Fly’s claws.”^{Footnote 63} British schadenfreude over Fly’s dismissal, however, failed to factor in a crucial difference between the FCC domestic and international telecommunication policies. The FCC’s haphazard attempt to reform the U.S. media system was met by fierce resistance from media managers and an increasing number of conservative members in Congress. At the same time, opponents to domestic reform appreciated how the FCC flexed the U.S. economic muscle abroad. Although the FCC’s radical rate cutting diminished U.S. carriers’ profits in the short run, it was the perfect vehicle to break up the closed British imperial communications, which benefited U.S. carriers in the long run. Business Week lauded the Roosevelt administration for recognizing “the postwar importance of freer communications as stimulant to the interchange of goods and ideas.” A liberalized international market “reduced costs of messages [that] will energize our trade, support our propaganda, [and] bolster business for all the lines.” Regardless of who headed the FCC, both private and public actors agreed to liberalize the international telecommunication market.^{Footnote 64}

Although Fly’s successor initially compromised with Cable & Wireless on the Brazilian rates and agreed to prior consultations before any future rate change, the FCC soon ordered unilaterally a rate reduction to South America, the UK, and Puerto Rico within one month.^{Footnote 65} The agency, backed by other public and private actors, remained firm in its commitment to freedom of communication. As an entourage of State Department and FCC officials as well as U.S. carrier representatives followed the advancing Western Allied forces to negotiate rate agreements with liberated European states, the FCC continued to pit the cheaper U.S. wireless circuits against the British cables. The Netherlands and Italy accepted under protest. The British government officially refused to submit to the FCC rates.^{Footnote 66} London, however, knew it would have to acquiesce to avoid another FCC traffic blockade like in Brazil.^{Footnote 67} Alarmed, the British Embassy in Washington reported on a policy that might be at worst “a declaration of a rate war.”^{Footnote 68}

Both the FCC’s crusading and the tacit public-private mutual co-optation in the United States neatly tied into the State Department’s agenda, which began to reintegrate telecommunication policy in overall postwar planning. Since early 1944, the department worked to create “a common spokesman [for] international negotiations” of the hitherto disparate U.S. actors engaged in international telecommunication. At first, its chief telecommunication experts, Francis Colt de Wolf and his superior Adolf Berle, initiated informal talks with U.S. legislators to integrate the demands of executive, legislative, and private interests.^{Footnote 69} For overall U.S. foreign policy strategy, freedom of communication would clear the way for U.S. news agencies as well as the State Department to disseminate information across the globe. Already before telecommunication regulators joined forces, private and public U.S. information providers had agreed to cooperate in facilitating the spread of information made in the United States. The mutual aim was not to establish a formal empire, but, in Justin Hart’s words, an “Empire of Ideas” that would mark the American Century.^{Footnote 70}

Initially, the FCC remained suspiciously absent from this common front. De Wolf reported to his British colleague that he remained “nervous” about the FCC, which was “less positively interested towards cooperation” than the State Department.^{Footnote 71} He claimed to have no handle on the FCC, but ingeniously recommended starting Anglo-American negotiations, which could lead to a bilateral agreement ending the FCC’s unilateral rate-cutting. Thus, he diplomatically threatened to unleash the FCC crusaders if the Commonwealth continued to resist talks to reform international telecommunication regulation.^{Footnote 72} De Wolf’s deputy Harvey B. Otterman informed London about the presentation of a rough U.S. reform plan at the Inter-American Radiotelecommunications Conference in Rio de Janeiro in the fall of 1945. Otterman, however, assuaged his peers in London that he would not try to establish a U.S.-led “western hemispheric bloc,” but meant the exact opposite. Openly professing the department’s preference for bilateral agreement with the Commonwealth first, he implicitly threatened to rally the Western Hemisphere behind U.S.-led reform, if the British did not engage in talks. The State Department pressured Commonwealth states to insist on regional regulation only and agree to talks to create a universal telecommunication regime.^{Footnote 73}

A Businesslike Deal? Postwar International Telecommunication Order

In 1945, the regionally closed system of Commonwealth communications clashed with the global U.S. vision for freedom of communication. For the United States, liberalization meant deregulating national or regional telecommunication policies, specifically those within the Commonwealth. Following the precedent of the creation of the United Nations, the U.S. State Department now coerced a reluctant British Commonwealth to discuss freedom of communication bilaterally in Bermuda in late 1945, continue trilaterally with the Soviets, before finally presenting a great-powers agenda to a universal conference in Atlantic City.

The reform from imperial to Commonwealth communications had just passed in mid-1945. It retained regional control over rate and service policy while devolving power from the London metropole to the periphery. Liberalization meant the end to regional control, which is why Commonwealth representatives resented U.S. moves. They also knew, however, that a flat-out denial would prompt more coercive measures. The “shock” of the FCC’s crusading sat deep.^{Footnote 74} “Unfortunately,” as Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to Washington, reported, U.S. companies and the military remained “better equipped to develop and produce telecommunications equipment and to tackle telecommunications questions.”^{Footnote 75} A British diplomat in Washington even advised staking everything on one chance. In exchange for permanently opening up the Commonwealth, he hoped to strengthen the U.S. commitment to international conventions and end the FCC’s “attempt at dictatorship of international rates.”^{Footnote 76}

Commonwealth communications also retained cohesion among the dominions and India, which thus continued to form a large voting bloc. The Australian Ernest Fisk praised Commonwealth communications for bringing “our own house in order” before entering into negotiations with the United States.^{Footnote 77} To soften this “‘ganging up’ of the Commonwealth against the rest of the world,” the British government even designed a public relations strategy.^{Footnote 78} In preparations for talks with U.S. representatives, Raymond Birchall, British Treasury official and new chairman of the CCC, warned against giving the impression of a British “abdication” to the United States in the eyes of the world. Instead, he proposed informally dividing the world between U.S. and British interests. The Commonwealth would govern telecommunication within its region, while the United States would dominate the Western Hemisphere.^{Footnote 79} A British diplomat in Washington confirmed that a hard-line approach was prone to harden positions, but figured that “when the parties and interests concerned get down to brass tacks,” a “business-like deal” could be struck with the United States.^{Footnote 80}

The Commonwealth gave in to U.S. pressure and first entered in “‘private huddle[s]’ avoiding all publicity.”^{Footnote 81} Then, the British government formalized these talks by hosting the Anglo-American Telecommunication Conference in Bermuda, still on British soil but close to the United States, in late November 1945.^{Footnote 82} In Bermuda, the two parties hammered out a compromise over rate and service policy. The State Department’s de Wolf requested a “no exclusion agreement” for companies seeking to establish end-point telecommunication facilities on foreign soil, which allowed U.S. carriers to continue servicing the Commonwealth. Since this merely confirmed the rights of dominions and India to determine their own service policy, they readily agreed. In exchange, the U.S. delegation agreed to allow the continuation of preferential rates within the Commonwealth.^{Footnote 83} Instead of total rate liberalization, Bermuda set a maximum rate. Here, the FCC’s new chairman, Paul A. Porter, demanded a twenty-cent ceiling per word for Anglo-American rates to Europe, because U.S. carriers “were making too much money.”^{Footnote 84} In the end, all compromised on a thirty-cent ceiling for commercial messages, a press rate of six and a half cents, and the right to retain the imperial press rate. Even these ceilings constituted a substantial rate reduction for U.S. carriers forced to relay messages through Commonwealth routes. Last, both sides agreed to consultation before any future rate change to prevent competitive rate-cutting.^{Footnote 85}

With the ink not yet dry on the agreement, the FCC nonetheless continued cutting rates. As the Radio Corporation of America entered negotiations with the Dutch government, the FCC’s license for the new circuit forced both parties to a twenty-cent instead of a thirty-cent ceiling in early 1946.^{Footnote 86} Thus, the FCC kept the Damocles sword of rate-cutting dangling over the Commonwealth states, while the State Department pushed them from bilateral agreements over service policy to reform the global telecommunication order.^{Footnote 87}

As a blueprint for reform, the State Department had produced a first draft for a new telecommunication order in late 1943. Although this plan was conceived as an antidote to European Axis telecommunication, it already featured the structures to implement freedom of communication. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) was to be wound up and replaced by a wholly “new international telecommunication organization” under “some newly created world political organization.” The new body would command “substantial powers” to pry open regional closed systems and implement the “freedom from service and rate discrimination.” More radically, this draft extended the liberalization of the international telecommunication to the information market. Freedom of information was supposed to enforce a ban on states regulating the movement of information in or out of their territories. For instance, no state was supposed to use immigration laws to deny foreign correspondents a residence permit or discriminate between the latter and domestic journalists.^{Footnote 88}

As an antidote to radical U.S. reform, the British and other European governments promoted the revitalization of ITU’s authority based on the prewar status quo. In 1944, Osborne Mance, a British army telecommunication expert, who would later work for the UN Economic and Social Council, outlined this position. He recommended strengthening the Berne Bureau by turning it into a permanent administrative council. In addition, a new central frequency registration board instead of the bureau would register the use of frequencies.^{Footnote 89} Other than that, the British government and Commonwealth representatives expressed their satisfaction with the workings of ITU bodies.^{Footnote 90} Unofficially, Commonwealth and other regulators agreed to resist “any conception of a new International organisation which approximate[d] to an extension of the Federal Communications Commission—a body with direct powers of control—in the international sphere.”^{Footnote 91}

The State Department knew of Mance’s proposal early on.^{Footnote 92} Otterman, de Wolf’s deputy of the Telecommunication Division, outright dismissed the prewar ITU as an ineffective regime of loose conventions and meetings. Instead, a permanent administrative council should not merely strengthen the Berne Bureau, but supervise two new, permanent, and supranational committees. Otterman admitted that the first, a central rates and traffic board, would touch upon “questions of national sovereignty,” but he reminded the British of the FCC’s unilateral rate cutting, which would cease if international rates were determined supranationally.^{Footnote 93} The second body, the frequency registration board, would also break with established ITU practices. Before the war, adherents to ITU conventions were merely asked to notify the Berne Bureau of their use of frequencies. They were neither obliged to do so nor did the bureau have any power to act if the signals of two stations interfered. To prevent interference, telecommunication experts met regularly in the International Telegraph Consultative Committee to compromise on a case-by-case basis. The U.S. plan, in contrast, stipulated an assessment of frequency use exclusively “from an engineering stand-point.” If a signal interfered with other stations, the board should not only suggest, but fix, the use of the frequency in question. While the old regime favored the commercially and technologically most advanced (US) companies as established in the 1920s, the proposed new rule strengthen regulatory control over them. The two boards, together with a strong central body, would provide the institutions for globally implementing freedom of communication. But that apparently technical standpoint masked a political agenda to govern international telecommunications through American ideals.^{Footnote 94}

Since the State Department knew that Commonwealth and European states were prone to support the status quo of the ITU, they tried to draw the old ITU closer to U.S. influence. Before international deliberations on the two plans commenced, Colt de Wolf graciously offered to move ITU’s administrative unit, the Berne Bureau, from war-scarred Europe to North America. Since neutral Switzerland had remained unaffected by the war, the offer signified an attempt to draw ITU closer into the new, U.S.-dominated UN system, whose charter was being debated in San Francisco at the time. With a decision on relocation pending, the department dispatched Gerald C. Gross, a FCC engineer who would head the ITU in the 1960s, to keep an eye on the Berne Bureau. Officially, de Wolf explained that Gross’s work as vice-director would infuse “new blood” into what he called a German-dominated administration. Unofficially, Gross was a watchdog to monitor European endeavors in “harmony with increasing American interest in World Telecommunications.”^{Footnote 95} To resist “American encroachment,” however, London could count on the Commonwealth states and other ITU members united in the interest of “defending their own telecommunication equipment industries” against U.S. competition.^{Footnote 96} The majority of ITU members voted against relocating to New York. Officially, the meeting explained that ITU benefited from “a technical rather than a political atmosphere” of a small, internationalist country like Switzerland.^{Footnote 97} Unofficially and very politically, they opposed New York because U.S. “commercial considerations and particularly manufacturing interests” threatened to dominate the ITU.^{Footnote 98}

Having failed to draw ITU into the U.S. orbit, the State Department increased the scope of the deliberation to include the Soviet Union, the third-most important agent creating the new postwar order.^{Footnote 99} The big five—two new superpowers, two old great European powers, and China as a spectator—met in Moscow in October 1946. Superficially, the meeting mirrored Dumbarton Oaks, which had drafted the contours of the charter for the new political world organization. In Moscow, the big five were also supposed to develop a joint position for ITU reform for presentation at a universal meeting of all members. Unlike Dumbarton Oaks, however, they only managed to agree on a lowest common denominator: the universal meeting would take place and reform, but not replace, the ITU. Nonetheless, the two superpowers remained adamant about radically overhauling ITU and, particularly, to remove European dominance. During the war, U.S. radio manufacturers perfected the technology for a commercial use of very and ultra-high frequencies not yet subject to international regulation. This begged the question of whether ITU should allocate this spectrum as well, which provided the United States with a lever to push for reform. Furthermore, the two superpowers agreed to integrate the ITU into the UN system. Before the war, European powers had prevented such an attachment to the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations. Ostensibly, this separation was meant to enshrine the technical character of ITU. In fact, it ensured the very political hegemony of European states over the Union, because imperial powers voted for their dependencies and the Soviet Union was not a member. Moscow concluded with an inconclusive draw: while the two superpowers agreed to supranationalize ITU as part of the UN system, the old great powers insisted on the status quo.^{Footnote 100}

After Moscow, the State Department again assumed the initiative to convene the conference without consulting other ITU members. U.S. officials asked Franz von Ernst, the director of ITU’s Berne Bureau, how to convene such a meeting. In response, the Swiss government, as the manager of Union, reported back that a slim majority of ITU members, led by Britain, already had voted to host the conference in Switzerland. Instead of accepting this vote, U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius courteously informed von Ernst that enough ITU members had backed the U.S. invitation and that the bureau would be wound up and replaced by a new institution within the UN system. Reporting to the UK Post Office, von Ernst considered it “childish” to remit seventy years of ITU experience to the dustbin, but jokingly suggested that the ITU “sell [its] archives for a million dollars to the Americans and live in luxury ever after.”^{Footnote 101}

With little reference to the old ITU, the U.S. government invited UN members to three successive conferences in Atlantic City to universalize the Moscow talks starting in May 1947. First, the Radio Conference was tasked with specifying the ITU’s 1938 Cairo regulations. Cairo had allocated a range of bandwidths, but not exact frequencies, to broadcasters, which should be rectified and elaborated in Atlantic City. The second, ITU’s plenipotentiary conference (International Telecommunication Conference), was supposed to revise the ITU’s structure. Last, the delegates were invited to deliberate during the World High Frequency Conference the mode of distribution of very and ultra-high frequencies, which should serve as a lever to implement the U.S. plan.^{Footnote 102}

The first and second conference accepted the wording of the U.S. plan but rejected its substance. The Union cut its ties with the Swiss government but remained in Switzerland and merely relocated from Berne to Geneva. Geneva had served as the seat of the League of Nations, but now it became the European UN Office. Thus, ITU’s move compromised between the U.S. and European plans. It remained in Europe and retained its own budget but became a specialized UN agency. Furthermore, the delegates agreed to strengthen ITU’s weak structures. The plenipotentiary conferences assembling all members remained the main body, but now they elected a Secretary General and a permanent Administrative Council. From its eighteen elected members, the five UN Security Council permanent members sent permanent directors to ITU too. All the old intergovernmental committees of experts for standard-setting were nominally subordinated under the new secretariat, but retained their names, prewar authority, and thus their intergovernmental character. Although the conferences turned ITU into a fully institutionalized organization, they retained the prewar, deliberately nonsupranational character.^{Footnote 103}

The U.S. plan to establish a new high-frequency board during the third conference to allocate the newly available high frequencies failed too. Another supranational board was supposed to assign these frequencies but conditioned their use upon the liberalization of the international information market. William Benton, chief of the newly created public diplomacy arm in the department, stood behind the move writing “freedom of information” into the constitution of this new board. ITU members would only be allowed to broadcast on these new frequencies if they “recognize[d] the principle of freedom to listen and agree not to prohibit radio reception by the public of news, information, and entertainment broadcasts.” States had to abstain, for instance, from jamming foreign broadcasts of the Voice of America or the BBC’s overseas service by sending random noise on the same frequency on a higher-energy level.^{Footnote 104}

The plan to condition frequency use upon content regulation, however, was superseded by the evolving parts of the postwar order within the UN. In principle, both Britain and the United States agreed to codify an international right to “freedom of information,” but they came to an understanding to pursue the regulation of content through the UN system, not ITU. Since the State Department itself had placed this issue high on both ECOSOC and UNESCO’s agenda, U.S. diplomats in Bermuda, Moscow, and Atlantic City abstained from pushing the issue. Similarly, British officials had already insisted in Bermuda that “nontechnical matters” were “quite foreign to the ITU” and noted that freedom of information was already under discussion within the framework of the new UN system and suggested creating an independent international broadcasting organization to deal with radio politics.^{Footnote 105}

Shortly before the conferences closed, ITU’s official journal lauded the Atlantic City conventions as a “historical watershed” for ITU.^{Footnote 106} Although ITU was converted into a specialized UN agency, little else changed. Instead of a strong, supranational, and, de facto, political organization, politics only entered the Atlantic City conventions insofar as the UN Security Council could order ITU member-states to cut links to aggressor states. Furthermore, the Atlantic City conventions prohibited carriers from discriminating against “private users” based on race, sex, gender, and religion. This formulation was copied from the UN charter. Thus, it was not ITU that determined antidiscrimination, but UN bodies deliberating human rights leading up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The Atlantic City conventions also safeguarded its adherents’ domestic jurisdiction. Carriers were exempted from transmitting messages that “may appear dangerous to the security of the state or contrary to their laws, to public order or decency,” which confirmed the validity of states’ media policies. Similar to the paradox of human rights, the carrier’s obligation to antidiscrimination was undermined by the retention of the state’s right to unilaterally define and ban offensive information from networks under its regulatory control.^{Footnote 107}

Atlantic City only constituted a historical watershed as it hardened the alleged technicality of ITU. Despite a comparative loss in economic, military, and political influence, the Commonwealth and the French, helped by smaller, often also colonial European powers, combined their votes to stymie radical U.S. plans to turn ITU into a supranational agency. The two superpowers, for instance, pushed through that only sovereign states could become members of the Union. The old powers, however, ensured that this rule applied only to new members, which allowed the former to keep the right to vote for their colonies. The U.S. plan to wedge freedom of communication into the new Union’s genes came to naught. Instead of determining international rates supranationally, bilateral or regional rate agreements between members of the Union remained admissible. This condoned preferential rates within the Commonwealth as well as the FCC’s unilateral rate-cutting and rendered the U.S. proposal for a rate board superfluous. Furthermore, Atlantic City’s delegates established the International Frequency Registration Board (IRFB) foreseen in the U.S. plan, but they refused to empower it to fix and enforce the use of frequencies. Similarly, the U.S. plan for a high-frequency board was not adopted and merged with the IRFB. In the tradition of the Berne Bureau, the latter merely registered, but did not enforce, the Union members’ frequency use. Although still fearful of U.S. and UN meddling in ITU, the French delegation, visibly relieved, reported back to Paris after the conferences that European powers merely entered a power-sharing deal with the two superpowers, but they prevented the ITU from turning into a strong supranational agency.^{Footnote 108}