Satellite Broadcasting as Trade Routes in the Sky

The metaphor of trade routes—used often to think about passages in the history of art and imagery—ought to nourish our conception of transnational paths of delivery of electronic communications. Our minds are full of Rupert Murdoch and Disney and the BBC as traders in information, great shippers of data, and distributors of huge slogs of sitcoms and news and advertisements. Now that the media is considered global, our general impression is of a constant and ever-present net that can deposit information anywhere. Common experience with the Internet seems, at first blush, to confirm and underscore a belief that data careens around the world from server to server, in patterns virtually impervious to purposive planning or political and legal intervention. ¹ Sender and receiver are linked in ways indifferent to the route or mode by which they are connected. The seamlessness of telephony in the developed world has created this model of indifference. In telephony, transmission pathways are irrelevant to the substantive decisions of most users.

In this vision, the world’s umbrella is such that information and data are ubiquitous, everywhere capable of distribution—even if there are inequities in the manner and pattern of uploading and gaps in the earthbound infrastructure to receive them. But satellite routes for the distribution of images (despite their digital communication) are not random. Rather, as with their nautical counterparts (ports of call), certain orbital slots for communications satellites have advantages over other information routes. Fear of pirates or factors equally cinematographic may no longer affect choice of passage, but what the new factors are and how governments and businesses interact to determine the value of one route as opposed to another remain open questions.

Information is so valuable a commodity in the late twentieth century, and trade in information is such an increasingly vital part of world balances and deficits, that it is productive to examine elements of the history of early-eighteenth-century shipping routes for common themes and discrepancies. This essay considers the conceit that satellite patterns are trade routes, each with its own agonized history and its own distinct impact. In the past, a trade route was an associated set of points that permitted ships to travel, to receive coal for refueling, and to provide food and recreation for the sailors. In short, a route comprised all stops necessary for a vessel to convey goods from location A to location B (and C and D) and to return with its holds replenished with raw materials. A good part of the history of colonialism can be read as the efforts of manufacturing and trading states to gain power or sovereignty over points that were key to the maintenance of trade routes.

Along continental coasts, harbors were links in a complicated chain. Frequently, the monopoly trading company (followed by the colonial power) gained full dominion and sovereignty over signal points along the route. ² There were negotiations between the trader (or the government of the trader) and the local authority (king, city leadership, or otherwise). Essential to investment, to the success of the trade, was the reliability of these points, and sovereign entities often extended special benefits to favored concessions (sometimes financial, sometimes otherwise)—the most favored being either large consuming markets or ports where raw material could be taken on.

Today, satellites constitute the points necessary for delivery of many video and other signals over long distances. The routes that information cargo follows are superficially very different from their nautical predecessors. Because this voyage is electronic, painless, free of manual labor, and invisible, no novel (science fiction aside) will be written about information trade routes; no Herman Melville of global transmissions will arise. Lives are not risked. No coaling stations are required as intermediate stops between ports of embarkation and ports of call, and the economic need for two-way traffic is diminished because the costs of returning an empty ship do not obtain. Within the order of the new information colonies, manufactured product is delivered without the extraction of raw materials—a pattern strikingly different from the eighteenth-century...