Kate Kaye

Network neutrality is under threat and advocacy groups such as Free Press, Fight for the Future and others are pushing to save it. That's not how Verizon, one of the Internet Service Providers hoping for a reversal of Federal Communications Commission rules enabling net neutrality, sees it.

"You gotta understand, there are a lot of advocacy groups out there that fundraise on this issue," said Craig Sillman, executive VP-public policy and general counsel at Verizon. "So how do you fundraise? You stir people up with outrageous claims. Unfortunately, we live in a time where people have discovered that it doesn't matter what's true, you just say things to rile up the base."

The Trump campaign used data and analytics to capitalize on clues from early voting returns, including data on Latino voters in Florida, whom an undisclosed Hispanic agency helped the campaign reach. That's according to Matt Oczkowski, who headed up the Trump campaign's team of embeds from U.K.-based data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Oczkowski believes that polls failed to predict victory for the president-elect in key battlegrounds partly because many surveyed only people deemed to be likely voters because they had voted in previous elections, excluding non-voters being drawn to the polls by Trump. "We've seen times over the course of the last month that pointed to a potential outcome like last night," Oczkowski said. Oczkowski, head of product at Cambridge Analytica and former chief digital officer for Gov Scott Walker's (R-WI) short-lived presidential primary campaign in 2015, said the Trump campaign looked at early voting data around ten days before the election and used it to update its data models for get-out-the-vote and last-minute persuasion efforts.

Cambridge Analytica has a mixed reputation in Washington (DC).

Several Republican strategists who have worked with or met with Cambridge in the past year see the company as a curiosity, an intellectually-advanced interloper that never really "got" American politics. Sources say the company bit off more than it could chew and failed to deliver some of the technology and analytics services it sold or meet crushing election-season deadlines. Even so, it has been widely-reported that Cambridge Analytica now is working with Donald Trump, whose GOP presidential campaign has been woefully devoid of a serious data team. GOP insiders affirm recent reports that Cambridge now has staff embedded with Donald Trump's campaign.

"I think they're not Americans, and they have a little bit of trouble understanding the American political systems and how things work," said a GOP political consultant. The consultant believes Cambridge's voter-data modeling is sophisticated and effective, but also complained that the firm is more focused on its sales and marketing efforts than actually fulfilling core analytics work promised to clients.

The Democrats have made a choice that could dictate how technology for campaigns and groups on the left is developed and disseminated for years to come.

The party has decided on a top-down approach to the way in which local, state, congressional and presidential campaigns employ and share voter data for everything from door-knocking to targeted TV advertising.

[Commentary] At this point, the topic may make your eyes glaze over. But make no mistake: network neutrality is a big deal for that ad business, and in turn, the ad-supported media ecosystem.

The companies that control the last mile of the Internet -- the likes of Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- would like to be able to charge different prices for the use of their pipes into the home. But while the net neutrality debate has focused on companies that provide entertainment or services on the web -- Google, Facebook and Netflix, for example -- it is also significant for marketers that use those pipes to communicate with their customers, like Unilever and P&G.

As the Federal Communications Commission comes closer to setting actual rules that might establish a multi-tiered system of fast lanes and slow lanes, they should be paying attention. If the FCC does allow Internet Service Providers to give speedier data delivery to companies willing to pay for the privilege, the online ad and publishing industries could look a lot different in the not-so-distant future.

Small publishers and small ad tech firms could fall prey to large firms able to pay for fast-tracking. Digital audiences and ad inventory could be redistributed. Publisher revenue models could shift towards more ad-subsidization or more subscription offerings. It might take a lot longer to load a video ad than the page content around it, or vice versa depending on who pays for better service. And new competition in today's commoditized programmatic ad sector could become reality.

"Pricing will go up for access from a marketing perspective in terms of CPMs," suggested Joe Apprendi, founder and CEO of ad-buying firm Collective and a digital ad industry vet. If a multi-tiered system forces more publishers away from ads to subscriptions, he said, that's also bad for marketers.

If political races have become data wars, conventional wisdom has it, the Democrats clearly have the advantage in 2014 and 2016.

After all, the stockpiles of data from President Barack Obama's two campaigns have been deposited in the party's armory alongside the software to put it to good use.

But while the party as a whole navigates a newly treacherous political landscape -- none other than Nate Silver predicted the Democrats could actually lose control of the Senate -- individual campaigns across the country may struggle to use something as big and complex as President Obama's data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign.

Despite the party's mission to provide unified, fresh data and underlying standardized technology platforms for all, there's a limited pool of practitioners who know how to put all this stuff to use for the more than 6,000 races in 2014. Over 1,000 state party staff and activists were trained to use the database platform by the Democratic National Congress in 2013, both in person and through webinars, learning how to do things like run queries using SQL, a database-management-programming language. But even if a small campaign has the money and wherewithal to hire a voter-file manager, most will have limited analytical resources.