San Diego - Baja: The Rise of the Region-State -- The Role of Telecommunications
Remarks
by John M. Eger before the U.S. - Mexico Border Summit with
the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Imperial County
Board of Supervisors, and Officials from Mexican Border Cities,
October 21, 1998
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I am John Eger, President of the SDSU International Communications Council. With me are co-chairs of a special committee charged with developing and promoting the concept of a borderfree telecommunications zone on behalf of the Council: LisZ Markham, Vice President and General Manager of KSWB 5/69, and Carolina Bustamante, President of TV Azteca-Baja California. After my brief presentation, each of us is available to answer any questions you might have.
We are delighted to be here today to talk about the importance of telecommunications to our region, in particular, the role telecommunications can play to blur the borders between our two countries, enhance the productivity of both San Diego and Baja, increase the economic prowess of the region and perhaps, create a model for other nations in what is clearly a borderless world economy.
Clearly there is a new world order and a new world economy brought about by the convergence of technology and economics -- the technology of telecommunications and information, and the economics of a global economy. In a few short years, we have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the shattering of the Eastern Bloc, the end of communism and the triumph of capitalism around the globe.
While not all people think about it in quite the same way, there is a direct link between the pervasive spread of technology -- the computer satellite link, the Internet and its progeny, the World Wide Web -- and these new economic and political freedoms.
For it is a fact that with satellites orbiting the earth at 22,000 miles in space, fiber optics criss-crossing the ocean floor, lap top, palm top, wristwatch communication devices throughout the world, nothing happens of importance that isn�t known instantly by everyone else. Time and space have collapsed and in the process, what we are seeing is a redefinition of wealth as information, and a realignment of power -- from nation-states, to states and local communities. Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citibank, has said "information has replaced gold as the new monetary standard;" and information technology has become the tool of wealth creation.
It is no secret that this is why Singapore launched its aggressive Intelligent Island or IT2000 initiative, wiring every home, school, and office, and putting a lap top in every kid�s backpack; why Japan, at a cost of 450 billion dollars is planning to do the same by the year 2015; and why France, as early as 1976 replaced telephone directories with computers in every home, the so-called "mini-tel," in order to jump-start their entry into the information age.
It is also why we launched San Diego, The City of the Future project in the early 1990s. Among our findings, however, was that cities of the future are not cities at all in the usual sense. Indeed, as the committee reported:
There are no national economies anymore -- only a global economy and a constellation of regional economies with strong cities at the core.
It was this recognition that San Diego and Baja were potentially one new economic region, that we recommended to the City and the County and the municipalities throughout the region, that we "blur the borders," using telecommunications.
"One of the most disturbing problems about the development of community-wide systems of any kind," the report said, "is that they tend to stop at political boundaries, whether they be municipalities or international borders, such as the one San Diego has with Tijuana. Clearly the movement of people and the conduct of business do not recognize these arbitrary geopolitical borders. In our plans to develop a community-wide grid, the Committee strongly recommended that the City and County play a leadership role and reach out to other municipalities within the greater San Diego region, and with Baja.
"As it becomes ever more clear," as author Neal Peirce has put it, "that national economies essentially are constellations of regional economies, each with a major city at the core . . . cities like San Diego play an ever-increasing leadership role in shaping the entire region." Tijuana, he points out, although in Mexico, clearly falls under the orbit of the San Diego city-state, divided only by one of the world�s busiest international crossing points.
Not that nation-states are going to disappear Peirce argues, "we need them for multiple critical tasks, ranging from air safety to banking regulations to income redistribution for poorer people. In the United States, state governments with their original powers of taxation and regulation also remain important."
San Diego, if it is to be a City of the Future, must follow the example of the city-state, a powerful new region it its own right. We are here today to urge the County of San Diego to help us in this effort.
The SDSU International Communications Council, which chaired, staffed, and wrote the City of the Future Commission Report, unanimously adopted a resolution in 1996 supporting the recommendations of the City of the Future Commission and among other matters, agreed to promote the concept of a borderfree telecommunications zone. The compelling reasons for such an initiative are:
1. To create a seamless, broadband network to knit our two communities together;
2. To make it easier and less-expensive for all of our citizens who work on one side of the border, but live on another; and
3. To create the information infrastructure for the new knowledge-based age, enabling us to be a leader in what is clearly a new world economy based upon the power of information.
The last point is critical. For computers and telecommunications are the cotton gin of the information age. Such information infrastructures -- broadband fiber optics, and borderless wireless systems -- are essential to the long-term success of our region.
While cities of the past were built along railroads, interstate highways and waterways, cities of the future will be built along information highways, new communications infrastructures to carry voice, video, text and data to every home, school, hospital and business, large and small.
Already, we have evidence that the products of our new age -- multimedia -- are the goods and services we need for local, regional and national economic success and survival. In the Bay area, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of information workers are already producing these new knowledge-based products.
In Los Angeles last year at the 4th Annual Cities of the Future Conference, sponsored by the California Institute for Smart Communities at San Diego State University, we heard the story of the filming of the Titanic from Digital Domain. Scott Ross, President of Digital, said that of the hundreds of workers who produced the film, edited it, scored it, and provided the high-visual content that made it the blockbuster it was, in most cases never met. Certainly not on a daily basis. Rather, they operated through a complex network of communications systems often from their homes or remote studio links.
Together San Diego and Baja can create the same kind of seamless network and be a major participant in the new knowledge-based entertainment and information economy. This is one of the major reasons for the Borderfree Telecommunications Zone.
Although the benefits of seamless networks for health care, education, law enforcement, and those already doing business in our region are more clearly evident, all segments of the consumer and business population would be well-served, for the zone itself would:
- Create an area of forty miles north, and forty miles south of the existing border.
- Within the zone, all calls would be local.
- Within the zone, cable and other service providers could wire our joint community, needing nothing more than a construction permit, if that, from either San Diego or Tijuana city government as appropriate;
- All
communications would take place within the region without
restriction. It would, in short, be a deregulated telecommunications
zone, albeit closely monitored by both the FCC and SCT,
or as has been recently suggested, by a special Binational
Commission on Telecommunications.
Such a zone, of course, would be a model for the world, as the world is moving swiftly towards global interconnectivity and hopefully, a harmonized, deregulated telecommunications society.
In the long run, many people argue, the borders will come down and technology will prevail. It is, however, the short run that the Council is most interested in. We want San Diego-Tijuana, or more properly, the greater San Diego-Baja region to be one of the leading region-states of the new world economy. Being first, therefore, becomes a matter of some priority. It is a priority we believe which merits this County�s leadership, and we ask you to work with us to make the borderfree zone a reality.
Thank
you.