Doha 2017

DOHA 2017
21-23 MARCH 2017
TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND DIGITAL MEDIA FORUM
The IIC was in Qatar in March for its first international meeting in 2017.
The meeting was supported by the Communications Regulatory Authority of Qatar. Read the press release here.
This was an interesting region for many reasons. The mobile market is growing robustly in subscription terms largely due to the expansion of the migrant workforce and there is untapped demand for advanced data services, particularly among businesses. Growing interest in video content is evident, boding well for service diversification strategies.
KEY DISCUSSION THEMES
This richly expanding marketing and explosion of digital consumption provides challenges for regulators and policy makers. It is against this backdrop that we will discuss:

COMPETITION & CONVERGENCE
What interventions can be taken to drive competition? What opportunities are there for media and communications industry convergence?

STIMULATING INVESTMENT
Building certainty and incentives to promote sustainable investment in telecom and digital media innovation and infrastructure. Examining fiscal policies, broadband plans, universal service provision.

DIGITAL CONTENT
What are the arguments for and against a new policy environment for OTT and digital content/service providers? Protecting the digital consumer from spam, premium rate services, illegal content

DIGITAL ECONOMY
How to achieve the economies of scale to deliver mass M2M and IoT in smaller emerging markets? Debating routes to 5G, spectrum neutrality of use, cross border data flows
PLUS
• Consumer protection
• Digital identity and national cybersecurity
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
HE Dr Abdulaziz Salem Al Rwais
Governor, Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
HE Sh Nasser Bin Mohamed Al Khalifa
Deputy Director General, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, Bahrain
SPEAKERS
REGIONAL REGULATORS FORUM: Regulatory Snapshot
21 March 2017
Exclusively for communications regulators, in addition to the ‘formal’ presentations and discussions that happened over the course of the Forum, we had short snapshots of the key issues that regulators are facing as the opener for the regulators' only dinner.