Abstract
125 SUMMARY Telecommunications policy has become crucial with the recent development in telecommunications technologies, the basis of the information society. Deregulation and liberalization have emerged as the leading factors in the debate on telecommunications policy implementations. Yet this `liberal` policy which has been widely applied in the U.S.A., Britain, Japan and Western Europe for the last decade has not been totally succesfull in achieving its main aims such as lower prices, a rise in productivity and efficiency of telecommunications networks. Thus it is argued that there should be a compromise in which the main telecommunications netwoks and services would be cotrolled by public bodies while competition in the new services, such as VANs, videotext and cable TV, would continue. This liberal policies have spread from the center to the perifery and periferal countries have made huge investments in telecommunications with or without deregulation and liberalization. In Turkey this investment in telecommunications and implementation of new information services have been carried out by the Turkish PTT, a state monopoly, without legal or institutional transformations since 1983. The absence of new legal and institutional regulations in telecommunications has brought abouth a delay in the implementation of new services such as cable TV and Integrated Services Digital Netwoks (ISDN). Furthermore, budget strains have led to a decrease in PTT investments and this decrease has in turn caused a crisis in the telecommunications equipment industry. To cope with the crisis and to rapidly implement new information services, it is vital to create a new legal and institutional framework in the information sector.
