Telecommunications infrastructure has been described as the ‘central nervous system’ of the very process of globalization (Castells 1996; Mansell 1994). Access to telecommunications services is increasingly assumed as a minimum condition of participation in the ‘new economy’ with the telecommunications industry as the foundation for Information Technology (IT), new media and financial services. Global advertisements plastered on television screens and billboards are replete with images of seamless high-tech networks that instantly link stock markets, urban centres and ethnically diverse consumers together, erasing national economic as well as cultural boundaries. Beneath the glamour and the breathless pace of these new technological transformations are the equally stunning, if less celebrated, changes in the ways in which telecommunications as an industry is governed. Beginning in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the deregulation and liberalization of national telecommunications markets was seen as imperative by policy-makers across the globe. Today, we see a shift in policy discourse in at least the recognition that there are social obstacles associated with rapid global integration. The ‘United Nations Millennium Development Goals’ (see Table 5.2) acknowledges the centrality of access to communications technologies as vital to the eradication of global poverty and hunger. As such, access to communications is seen as a basic human need linked to participation in modern economic as well as political activity (ITU 2003: 73).