Geek in chief
“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks.”
President-elect Obama sent that message on November 5 via Twitter, the online social network and instant messaging service, instantly reaching the 125000 people following him using the online software.
Obama reportedly “tweeted” regularly throughout the campaign using his BlackBerry smartphone. While Republican candidate John McCain was blithely admitting that he didn’t know how to use a computer, Obama’s campaign was making extraordinary use of the Web, social networks, cellular text messages and e-mail to energise younger voters, who turned out to vote in large numbers.
The campaign even created an application for the Apple iPhone that allowed Obama supporters to prioritise their contacts by key battleground states so they could make calls and encourage their friends to vote Democrat.
With the recent launch of a new website, Change.gov, Obama has signalled his administration will continue to use the Web to communicate actively online with Americans.
Technology has brought a new level of interactivity to politics. Though Obama can’t have read everyone’s replies to him on Twitter — his Twitter stream is available at twitter.com/barackobama — you can be sure his campaign paid close attention to what people were saying. One hopes he continues using Twitter, not only to tweet but also to listen to ordinary people.
Obama is clearly no tech neophyte. He has promised to make technology issues a cornerstone of his government and looks poised to appoint a chief technology officer (CTO) to his administration.
One of the CTO’s principal jobs will be fighting telecommunications operators over “Net neutrality”. The operators argue that they have the right to slow down certain types of network traffic, such as bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer transfers. But Net neutrality advocates say the operators must not be allowed to use their control of the telecom pipes that will deliver media and other bandwidth-hungry services into people’s homes to keep potential competitors at bay.
Those in favour of Net neutrality say the operators must not be allowed to distinguish between different types of content flowing across their networks.
Bandwidth shaping like this is par for the course in SA but, in the US, media and other companies are lobbying hard to stop operators from engaging in the practice.
Obama has made it clear he supports Net neutrality. His technology agenda states that a “key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way.”
But not everyone agrees the Internet should be regulated in this way. Operators argue that imposing Net neutrality regulations would reduce the incentive for them to build new, higher-speed networks.
And the federal trade commission, one of the US agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law, last year warned against imposing regulations in a market where there is no “significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers”.
Net neutrality looks set to become a point of contention in the next few years. Whether or not Net neutrality regulations would be good or bad — I haven’t made up my mind on this issue — at least the US has a president who understands technology.
Loading ...