 Hello. My name is Dwayne Winsack. I'm a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication here at Carleton University. I'm also the director of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project. This is a shirk-funded research project that looks at a deceptively simple but profound question. Have the media industries in Canada become more concentrated over time or less? In order to answer this question, we look at the development of about a dozen and a half sectors of the telecommunications media and internet industries over a 30 year period. We're looking at everything from mobile phones to television to newspapers to search engines and internet advertising. We think that this is really important research because for a very long time there's been a lot of discussion, political debate and policy formation in this country that has taken place without a very strong basis of evidence. We hope to backfill that absence of evidence with our research efforts and in fact we're seeing that our evidence is being used in a wide variety of situations before regulators, in Parliament, before Senate committees and even right now before the Broadcasting Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel. We think that this research also has global significance and right now we're putting together a 40-country research project and we're calling that the Global Media Concentration Research Project and basically it will take what we've done here in Canada and replicate that in 40 countries around the world because we're living in an age in which digital platforms and the internet are becoming ever more important and some people are arguing that the commercial viability of other media are now dependent upon the Facebooks and Googles of the world and some are even arguing that the integrity of democratic processes are being affected by these entities. We want to look at these questions and we want to take up the issues seriously but we also want to offer a serious base of evidence from which policy makers worldwide can take their cues.