The Bermuda agreement on telecommunications 1945

The end of the Second World War saw global telecommunications governance renegotiated. The dominant British Imperial (later Commonwealth) network experienced multiple changes: the tightly integrated and collaborative imperial governance system fell away as the governing partners increasingly pursued their own, rather than a collective agendas and as the ‘imperial’ company, Cable and Wireless', dominance gave way to a competition and interconnection based regime as American firms and their networks entered markets hitherto closed to them. Though key elements of the Bermuda Telecommunications Agreement 1945 were soon to be renegotiated, the Bermuda Conference, at which the imperial partners and the new hegemonic power, the USA, bargained, was the fulcrum transitional event. Drawing on archival sources (notably in Canada and the UK) the author tells of the tensions within the fragmenting Imperial partnership, of an American mix of interest and idealism and of this episode in telecommunications liberalisation foreshadowing later changes.