May 2015

Nate Lubin, the White House’s social media guru, is stepping down. He’s left quite a legacy. President Barack Obama has used social media to connect with voters in the United States as well as people around the world more actively than any other President. The main reason for this is that other commander-in-chief’s haven’t had the online tools that Lubin, a 28-year old who started as a campaign volunteer in New Hampshire in 2008 and joined White House staff in 2013, has at his disposal. But that shouldn’t dismiss the effectiveness of some of the campaigns Lubin oversaw on behalf of the President, many of which rolled out some of President Obama’s more ambitious initiatives. To mark Lubin’s departure, we’ve gathered what we consider a few highlights, as well as some misses, of President Obama’s social media messaging:

• Lowlight: “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About, Featuring President Obama,” on Buzzfeed. The video was an effort by the president to get people to visit http://www.healthcare.gov. It comes across as a bit labored and not all that funny. But credit to Buzzfeed: they got President Obama to use a selfie stick.
• Highlight: The White House’s #FreeCommunityCollege campaign. The president posted a video on the White House Facebook page ahead of this year’s State of the Union address hyping the President’s plan to offer two free years of community college. By social media standards, it was a raging success: more than 8 million people have watched it.ident Obama’s social media messaging:

Verizon and Cogent announced an interconnection agreement that should improve Internet quality for Verizon's FiOS and DSL customers. The good news may be thanks partly to the Federal Communications Commission decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers, because Cogent could have complained to the FCC if the deal wasn't signed. Cogent, a transit provider that distributes traffic on behalf of businesses that deliver services over the Internet, has fought bitterly with Internet providers such as Verizon over whether it should have to pay for connections to their networks.

Cogent has maintained that the peering agreements should remain "settlement-free," without money changing hands, and says it won't have to pay Verizon under the new agreement. The fights reached a fever pitch when Cogent was distributing traffic from Netflix, which accounts for about a third of North American Internet traffic during peak usage hours. Netflix agreed to pay Verizon for direct connections to its network in 2014, relieving much of the stress on the Cogent-Verizon connections. But according to Cogent founder and CEO Dave Schaeffer, the Cogent/Verizon links are still "massively oversubscribed," causing performance problems when Verizon customers access the websites of Cogent customers. Cogent had threatened to file complaints to the FCC, as allowed by the commission's Open Internet Order. But that won't be necessary, at least in the case of Verizon, because of the agreement.

[Commentary] In his 2014 book, "The Accidental Superpower", Peter Zeihan traces the origins of America’s economic prosperity to its abundance of rivers. The US has more miles of navigable waterways, which provide a uniquely efficient and inexpensive means for transporting goods across a continent, than the rest of the world put together. According to Zeihan, this difference was a critical factor in the country’s emergence as the world’s leading superpower. And because rivers do not require large-scale efforts to build and operate, they favor decentralized development, which has encouraged local entrepreneurs, who represent a distinctive aspect of the US economy. The US is also blessed with many natural harbors that are another major contributor to a country’s economic success.

In recent years, it has been technology -- and especially information and communications technology (ICT) -- that has provided the critical infrastructure that has promoted economic growth in the US and globally. It turns out that the economic impact of ICT has been based not only on its technical characteristics, but also on the way that it has been developed and deployed. Although we remain the pre-eminent source of tech innovation, new technologies get diffused around the world almost overnight. If we are going to keep our economy strong in a highly competitive world, if we are going to keep the Internet-powered engine of innovation running at full speed, we need policies that will promote permission-less innovation, continued investment in expanding and upgrading our digital infrastructure and policies that encourage companies to use it creatively.

[Richard Adler is a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto (CA)]

Crown Castle is acquiring Quanta Fiber (called Sunesys), a subsidiary of Quanta Services, for about $1 billion in cash, a deal that will immediately bolster the wireless tower company's dark fiber capabilities for small cell backhaul services. A big element of this deal for Crown Castle is the fiber footprint to serve small cell backhaul deployments being carried out by major wireless operators in a number of key cities in the United States. By gaining access to Sunesys' dark fiber capabilities, Crown Castle will be able to address Verizon Wireless' desire to have these solutions for its macro cell and small cell deployments.

While other large operators have yet to join them, Verizon Wireless has been mandating that its backhaul partners deliver a dark fiber backhaul solution. Ben Moreland, CEO and president of Crown Castle, said that by acquiring Sunesys, the company will have fiber assets that could potentially serve more than 3,500 small cell opportunities. Sunesys currently owns or has rights to nearly 10,000 miles of fiber in major metro markets across the United States, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Silicon Valley and northern New Jersey. About 60 percent of Sunesys' fiber miles are located in the top 10 basic trading areas.