The Century of Communication

■ The Century of Communication

I read through “The Century of Communication: 150 Years of Information Technology and National Strategies” by Tetsuya Ohno. 

The attack and defense of communication sovereignty and infrastructure development since the Meiji era.

Fierce political and military struggles between nations and dark conflicts between the political, public, and private sectors regarding the domestic telecommunications industry.

Reading this makes the current GAFA measures seem childish.

Teruo Ariyama’s “Information Hegemony and Imperial Japan,” published in 2013, describes the fact that information and communications have been important political matters of the state since the modern era. Furthermore, Japan, too, has seen a series of high-level political decisions by the Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet.

Both publications are must-reads for telecommunications geeks.

I became a telecommunications bureaucrat during the monopoly era of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTT) in Japan and Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDD) internationally.

In the midst of the technological epoch of telephone automation, the KDD scandal occurred, and the company advanced headfirst toward telecommunications liberalization.

This was followed by the battle with the U.S. and the U.K. over the liberalization of telecommunications, the reorganization of NTT, and finally, deregulation.

It is quite nostalgic as my own work history.

Mr. Ohno takes the harsh view that the restructuring and deregulation of NTT at the end of the 1990s was “a failure of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications,” which lacked the ability to take part in technological progress and market changes.

I, as a middleman, took it as a purely administrative evolution. Though, when considering the correlation between the subsequent reorganization of ministries and agencies with the dismantling of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, I wonder if Mr. Ohno’s view is the legitimate one.

However, the offensive and defensive battleground that continued on for 100 years was drastically changed by the Internet.

Japanese carriers became truly domestic, while AT&T, BT, and Vodafone withdrew.

Yet, the leading role in telecommunications shifted to the upper layers, led by GAFA.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are also trying to get their hands on submarine cables.

It was only last year that the Telecommunications Business Law finally accommodated foreign services such as Gmail. As someone who knows the international offensive pre-Internet, it was like watching the Qing Dynasty under imperialism.

Let the EU lead the way and live with the US—is this the way to handle the next few decades?

“I think I would have gone into telecommunications bureaucracy even if I was born a hundred years ago.”

I wrote this seven years ago at the end of my book-reviewing blog on “Information Hegemony and Imperial Japan.”

It is no different now. I would like to enter that field and become a policy entrepreneur.