Seamless infrastructures, business models and cultural diversity

The project will focus on challenges regarding the interaction between business models, regulation, and technology for converging infrastructures within the media and ICT sectors. The project will emphasize the focus on policy relevant knowledge and resea rch that may be used by policy makers in an operative way. When focusing on regulatory issues we want to incorporate sector specific regulatory frameworks as well as general competition policy. The main topics of the project are: Network and media conver gence: Market service diversity and business models, where we want to explore market responses to network and media convergence both in terms of business models and market structures both from a business, regulatory, and socio-political point of view. Thi s will in particular be important if one objective is to ensure cultural diversity in a global content competition. A further important question will be to analyze whether or not commercialized provision will discriminate against cultural minorities with special interests. For regulatory reasons it should therefore be a task of high priority to analyze these issues in order to identify the most important economic forces in an unregulated market. Private property rights and innovation incentives, where an obstacle to the efficiency of market driven innovations vary across services, and it is an important task to examine the need for and the form of optimal public policy in each market. Convergence between the ICT and the media sector, where the focus will be that technological change may affect concentration in media markets. Communicating organisations, where the project will analyse governmental organisations as communicating organisations in an environment of rich media and complex messages being commu nicated.