It is not clear that there is or will be something called global governance.  But that doesn't mean that emerging elements of quasi-regulation or interstitial forms of control are not emerging that have some similarity to what might otherwise be the consequence of more formal mechanisms.   One important locus for this phenomenon involves determination of use of transponder facilities by channel services.  In one sense, there is little or no formal mechanism for determining whether anything other than the market determines access to some satellite to reach particular audiences.  
 
Increasingly, there is a fill-in of this regulatory space,  sometime through pressure on those who make transponder leasing decisions,   sometime by state regulation, sometime by actions of states that, themselves or through state-controlled surrogates, actually manage the satellites.   Sometimes it occurs, at the next level where the issue involves carriage of satellite-delivered channels to cable services. 
 
One major interesting decision on this question involves carriage of Al Manar on Eurosat, and related decisions concerning Al Manar in the United States . These have led to informal activity at the European level to energize national regulatory agencies.   But even these decisions hark back to earlier events involving Serbian channels, MED-TV (Kurdish) and in some cases concerns about  Al Jazeera. 
 
Are patterns emerging?  Is there an inchoate regulatory pattern that affects the previously existing market for use of transponders?

Panel Moderator:

Prof. Price is Director of The Project for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research. Prof. Price, who was Dean of Cardozo from 1982 to 1991, graduated magna cum laude from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and was an assistant to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz.

He was founding director of the Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Prof. Price was a senior fellow of the Media Studies Center in spring 1998. He was deputy director of California Indian Legal Services, one of the founders of the Native American Rights Fund, and author of Law and the American Indian. Among his many books are a treatise on cable television, Media and Sovereignty and Television, The Public Sphere and National Identity.