Playing politics with Iraqi phone service

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The auctioning off of Iraq began in the summer of 2003 in a packed conference room at the Grand Hyatt in Amman, Jordan. More than 300 executives had gathered from around the world to vie for a piece of one natural resource Saddam Hussein never managed to exploit—the nation’s cellular phone frequencies.

Mother Jones has an interesting article on how some republicans are trying to get Iraq to adopt what most of us consider an inferior, overly proprietary technology that is controlled by the US, when everyone around them in Europe are using the GSM standard. If Americans get their way, the Iraqis will be railroaded into a narrow cellular standard that is incompatible and alienates them from every other country on their content, but on the bright side, a select number of republican-connected corporations will profit. Score another for The American Way(tm)!



 

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