Gundersen 1 The Information Grab of 2016 There were some unsettling parallels between the 2000 and 2016 Presidential elections. Growing up in the Silicon Valley, I experienced some important transition periods in tech. I am also a fairly reliable establishment Democrat voter. Establishment platforms have gained much notoriety during the recent election cycle but to what end? Donald Trump is the 45 th president of the United States. Multitudes are expressing fear and anxiety about the future. It was an upset victory. We experience information in flux, all day, through our handhelds and our laptops let alone television and radio. Depending on our lived experiences different bits of info stand out to different people. The life cycle of this info is duly influenced by our individual mental states; our attention spans and our memory. What were the similarities from the election cycle of 2000 and this latest election? For one, Democrats as a whole were unable to back their candidate because of certain (small) issues. Additionally, a couple of telecom giants were quietly making big moves in the background. What can industry moves during election seasons tell us? Well, they give us hints about the upcoming transition. Tiny Ripples or Giant Waves? About the time when the primary elections were settled this past summer, East Coast Telecom Giant, Verizon, announced an interest in a merger or buyout of Yahoo. A bit closer to Election Day it was announced that AT&T wanted to buy Time Warner. The last time I remembered these two moving in tandem was the 2000 election. Late that year, I was working at a place called Northpoint Communications. This place boasted the largest nationwide switch
Gundersen 2 based data network. Small internet service providers (ISPs) got high speed DSL through Northpoint who had equipment laid out in all of the major regional telecoms. Four years earlier, Congress signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. The act forced large telecoms to allow these third party companies to access their equipment in order to implement data networks over existing telephone and cable infrastructure. This brought us the high speed digital revolution. It also created the tech bubble. Or, was it the tech boom? To be fair, this was good for businesses. I do not recall there being a great benefit to customers. There were a dozen different choices for getting DSL, it was not cheap, and there was quite a run-around in getting service and getting service fixed. But the job market exploded. This middle man company, Northpoint, was only one of a brand new breed of competition and headache for these telecom giants. So, the summer before the 2000 election, Verizon announced a desire to merge with Northpoint. Likewise, the summer before the 2016 election, Verizon announced a desire to merge with Yahoo. Northpoint added so many new employees and spent so much to prepare for the merger that when Verizon eventually backed out, they went bankrupt. By this past fall, Verizon indicated that they are not so sure about Yahoo anymore because of a recent hack. This is no coincidence. Back to 2000: Once Northpoint goes bankrupt, AT&T indicated they were interested in the company. However, AT&T bought Northpoint at auction, disbanded the customer relations workforce and kept the equipment this nationwide switched data network. A few months later in the spring of 2001, once Bush had been sworn into office, Congress signed a new bill which eliminated the telecom and cable carrier s obligation to third party companies. The bill was called the Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act of 2001. Again, in fairness, while this is the catalyst culminating in what is commonly referred to as the dot com crash, consumers
Gundersen 3 were the real winners hear with DSL and cable broadband becoming more readily available and well serviced directly by the carriers. Ties and Implications What could AT&T buying Time Warner and Verizon buying Yahoo have to do with the outcome to the 2016 election? And what could it all mean for our future looking forward? Brian Fung of the Washington Post outlined this issue for the public in a November 11 th article titled, Why Trump Might Not Block the AT&T-Time Warner Merger, After All. During his campaign, Donald Trump expressed his distaste for a CNN documentary which expressed him in an unappealing light. CNN is owned by Time Warner. Additionally, Trump has hired Jeffrey Eisenach onto his transition team who will help design future tech policies for the administration. Eisenach is a scholar at one Republican think tank in Washington whose previous clients included non-other than colossal telecom Verizon. The article cites analysts that indicate that AT&T was poised for a Clinton Administration. I disagree. These monsters were lurking in the background and they moved in the same fashion this election cycle as they did 16 years back. This is a mistake which the media tries again and again to disseminate. They do this for companies and candidates alike. It is this idea that the people who run the government, like those major companies who hold the most sway over our everyday lives, are actually not so bright; they are foolish; they do dumb things; they lack foresight. I am not so sure. Obama has an internet legacy that the other side of the isle might feel is worth dismantling net neutrality, et al. The GOP is not happy that technology companies have refused to cooperate during investigations relating to national security. It seems possible that Yahoo is a
Gundersen 4 step toward that control center, the search engine. It is a sort of intangible version of infrastructure that these communication companies have been forced to allow over their networks in the same way that the data network was forced upon their telephone and cable layout. We are definitely in store for some sweeping changes as the transition team rolls out Trump s policy. I only hope that there is some benefit to the customer. Information and Presidential elections What did Democrats forget between 2000 and 2016? Back then we argued with each other much after the primary season about Gore s internet creation dialogues. Did he say he invented the internet? What about ARPANet? Who invented hypertext transfer protocol? Gore was referring to this Telecommunications Act, it is that simple. As political party members we should be in full support of the party nominee well before the prospect of a Florida recount let alone a Supreme Court ruling. The same is true of this election cycle. This loss is due to a lack of coherence between the messages our constituencies take in. We allow ourselves to gobble these frivolous gossips spread through communication networks who are not in favor of our party leadership to begin with. They are actively pursuing new ways to control what information is available and when. One can try to find solid information amid the rapid disbursement of clickbait, fakes, or quirk humor, but added difficulty is placed on the task of convincing a group that this is, in fact, solid information. It is a mistake to believe that any person will reach the stage of Presidential candidate who is unfit for office. Yet, this concept is shoveled into the minds of many people. How can we expect our candidate to win office if we allow information sources to tell us otherwise?
Gundersen 5 Every major news outlet in the country inundated us with this cliché, the lesser of two evils, and about 60 million people thought it was Clinton, while 60 million others believed it was Trump. Somewhere along those lines there was not enough accord internally and Democrats have nobody to blame but ourselves. Keep an eye on the technology news. These large companies are just making their way to the foreground now that our new president has been named. The last time they moved like this, sweeping changes adjusted the way we exchange information with each other and information is our only basis for decision making when we try to decide who will lead our country, each election cycle.