International Institute of Communications

2009 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Centre Mont-Royal, Montreal, Canada, Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 October 2009

Trends in Global Communications: Wrestling with unpredictability

Introduction
A retrospective over the forty years since the founding of the IIC illustrates the impact of new technology in the communications field - and, indirectly, on almost every aspect of social and economic life. Many of the best guesses of each generation of communications experts have been confounded by the speed and direction of change.

The global economic and financial crisis has only added to the complexities faced by communications companies in structuring and adapting their business models and securing their balance sheets. Demand has slackened throughout the production and distribution chain.  Funding the future – research and development and infrastructure investment – has become more difficult precisely at the moment when it is most needed.

The IIC’s fortieth anniversary Conference will continue its tradition of facilitating the sharing and exchange of empirical data, specialist knowledge and accumulated insights, and of helping to find pointers towards future trends – tent-pegs of probability on a landscape of uncertainty. It will bring the expertise of key speakers to bear on such issues as:

• The relative weight of technology and user choice in shaping content-creation and distribution, and the communications sector at large
• The imprint the global financial and economic crisis has had on communications companies, on consumption in services and on capital investment in infrastructure
• The policy dilemmas – political and financial – which high-speed broadband poses for policy-makers and regulators
• The price society may need to pay to sustain ‘high quality’ programming and information in an increasingly fragmented media world
• The challenge to regulators to break new ground in devising approaches and mechanisms which can cope with industry players increasingly operating on new platforms and across national borders

For enquiries please contact j.grimshaw@iicom.org