The comfort of strangers

JUST in case Rupert Murdoch manages to circumvent the problems he is having in launching a satellite-television operation in the United States, the Clinton administration appears to want to put a new one in his way. It has just asked the Federal Communications Commission to look again at its relaxed attitude to foreign satellite operators. Keeping foreigners out of the communications business is nothing new. Back in the 1890s, the French government banned foreign ownership of the pigeon post. The pigeons have given way to the cables and satellites that deliver telephone calls and television pictures, but controls on foreign ownership have stayed and spread. They are even less justifiable now than they were then.