October 2016

Fox News hasn’t always known how to handle the Trump phenomenon The Fox News audience is old and getting older. Trump TV could grab younger conservatives. When push comes to shove, I’d probably still bet on Fox News in this potential battle. But it’s clear that the network is trying to shed some of its reputation as a news source for older white men — particularly as it continues to boost the profile of Kelly. And at a time when Trump’s campaign is driven so heavily by playing directly to the identity politics of white men, well, there’s probably a market niche in which Trump TV can thrive. Making that demographic appeal to white male identity politics so far looks like it won’t win Trump the White House. But that appeal is one that can work in an ever more divided media landscape. Trump TV probably can’t vanquish Fox News — but it could become Fox News’s younger, “more conservative” alternative, as unlikely as that sounds.

In many ways, President Barack Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts were in part led by a founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois senator’s campaign so much that he left the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team. After he was elected, he created a trifecta of executive positions in his administration modeled on corporate best practices: chief technology officer, chief data scientist, chief performance officer. He sat for question-and-answer sessions on Reddit, released playlists of his favorite songs on Spotify and used Twitter frequently, even once making dad jokes with Bill Clinton. He stoked deep and meaningful connections with scores of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

President Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals. Even his tech-specific fumbles seem unlikely to mar his permanent record: The rocky debut of HealthCare.gov, the online insurance marketplace that cost more than $600 million to build and crashed almost immediately after it went live, was later brushed off as a technical difficulty. And his administration’s pressure on Silicon Valley companies to aid its cybersecurity efforts hasn’t seemed to dampen their enthusiasm for him. Obama used his ties to the tech sector to foster diplomacy: Last year, he took Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, with him to Cuba as an economic endorsement of the revolutionary powers of start-ups to change the world.

[Commentary] My take is that there was one fundamental flaw going into this, one that’s probably still floating around: Google believed they could revolutionize the laying of fiber. They didn’t just think they could offer a kickass service, they thought they could deploy much cheaper and much faster than anybody else had ever done. That’s fully in line with the Google mindset, but unfortunately it ignores the fact that hundreds of company had been deploying wireline access infrastructure for years by the time Google Fiber decided to give it a go.

I’d suggest we’re now seeing the windfall from that misguided assumption: Google is finally admitting (in a roundabout way) that despite all the clever people they have on hand, they haven’t revolutionized fiber deployment. It still takes time to do the planning properly, to work with local authorities effectively, to do the outside plant layout efficiently. Did Google manage to do things cheaper than others did ? Probably, but not by a wide margin. And as they decided to scale beyond Kansas City, they realized that the efficiencies they might have been able to find in KC didn’t scale well elsewhere because a lot of those things are down to local specificities and relationships.

[Benoit Felten is a Chief Research Officer at Diffraction Analysis]