You Can Trust Our Reviews
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Buying Guide: Google Wins the Presidential Election (So Does Obama)
Contents
- Google Wins the Presidential Election (So Does Obama)
- Companies Shouldn't Rest
And it's done: Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. Let's set aside the crashing economy, two wars, and a deeply divided society to ask (we are PC Magazine, of course): What does this mean for tech?
Google actually won this election. Every way you slice Obama's tech policy, it is good news for Google.
The struggles over net neutrality, white-space broadband, and telecom competition all have the same theme. Should the government lean towards protecting the rights of large, incumbent players in a space, or lean towards disrupting those marketplaces for new entrants? No matter what, there's always a lean; in these kinds of battles, no policy is neutral.
The incumbent players in the battles vary. For net neutrality and telecom competition, the incumbents are large ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast. The upstarts are content-oriented companies like Google, Disney, and Yahoo!, and small up-and-coming telecom players. In terms of white-space broadband, AT&T, Verizon, and Google want to upset the apple cart currently run by content companies like CBS, NBC, and Disney.
It looks like the Obama administration may upset all the apple carts towards Google.
I mean, come on. On Obama's Web site, he actually mentions Google as a model, pledging to create "a Google-like search engine that will allow ordinary Americans to track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans online."
Obama's most prominent tech advisers include Eric Schmidt of (yup) Google, and former FCC heads Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard, along with "free culture" proponent Larry Lessig (who backed away from the campaign after being a little too vocal about his atheistic views).
Hundt chaired the FCC from 1993 to 1997, overseeing a massive increase in telecom competition thanks to the 1995 PCS spectrum auctions and the Telecom Act of 1996. Before Hundt, there were only two cell-phone companies in any market. Kennard is obsessed with "digital divide" issues, which means rural broadband, which means white spaces and new ISP entrants. With Kennard on board (and Obama's focus on the "digital divide" in general) expect white-space broadband to start moving quickly, boosting the fortunes of Motorola, Intel, and, yes, Google.—Next: Companies Shouldn't Rest >