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Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.

Both sides in the presidential contest mined click-stream data as never before to target messages to potential voters. But a real edge for the Obama campaign was in its use of online and mobile technology to support its much-praised ground game, finding potential supporters and urging them to vote, either in person or by phone, according to two senior members of the Obama technology team, Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign, and Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign. A program called “Dashboard,” for example, allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. The Web application — viewable on smartphones or tablets — showed the location of field workers, neighborhoods to be canvassed, and blocks where help was needed.

The lesson corporate marketers are learning from the estimated $6 billion poured into political advertising in the US this cycle: marketing is war.

While the size of the army counts, so does the battle strategy. Simply outspending a rival by blanketing the airwaves with television ads no longer translates into a guaranteed win amid the rise of digital media, say political consultants and advertising executives. Today’s campaign battle plans require attacking with television ads that are precisely targeted by message and geography, coupled with sophisticated digital and grassroots efforts. “You should never do one or the other,” said Rob Norman, global chief digital officer at WPP’s GroupM media buying unit. Presidential campaigns typically serve as test beds for new advertising strategies and the lessons learnt often influence corporate marketing strategies. “Television ads remain the story, the biggest expression of the campaign. They are still powerful,” said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, the WPP-owned digital consultancy behind Obama’s campaign. “What we do is different. It is not about getting millions of impressions but about stimulating small pockets.”

"We are definitely moving away from a copper world," says telecom consultant Roger Entner at Recon Analytics. "Copper is very limited, compared with what you can do with fiber or with the most advanced wireless technologies today." But there's a tradeoff.

"Are we going to give up some of the reliability of a copper network?" Entner asks. "Quite possibly." Reliable, universal service was part of the American social contract when the phone system was first built out. That's important to poor, rural users who may just have a phone line, says consumer advocate Harold Feld at Public Knowledge. He says New Yorkers learned about copper's reliability in Hurricane Sandy. "People who had cable VOIP or FIOS were trying to find payphones," Feld says, "because that old copper technology held up, where the new networks did not hold up nearly as well." Feld also wonders how affordable the new telecom world will be. He says guarantees that applied to old copper lines may not apply to the newer technology. "Because there's no rules for these new networks," Feld says, "they can decide, 'well we're happy to sell you our phone service as part of our cable service and data service, but we are not interested in selling you just a phone service for $25 a month.'" Feld says the question is, as we move into a post-copper world, whether to bring with us the old copper safety net.

The Australian government has abandoned its 5-year-old pledge to mandate a filter blocking child pornography and other objectionable Internet content. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said that instead of a compulsory filter being imposed, Internet service providers have agreed to block 1,400 child abuse websites on INTERPOL's "worst of" list. Three of Australia's largest telecommunications companies — Telstra, Optus and Primus — have been blocking the listed sites since 2010. "We've actually reached agreement with the industry to block child pornography and we think that is a significant step forward," Conroy told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.