The quarterfinals: Vote for the most powerful person in telecom

 

UPDATE: Voting is now over. Click here for the results.

 

The results are in from round two, and now it’s time to move into the round of eight. 

In past years, Fierce has published a list of who we think are the most powerful people in the U.S. telecom industry. But this year we’re letting you decide. Every day this week we’re going to run a new round of voting in a tournament-style bracket, and on Monday we’ll announce the winner. Click here for the results from the first round and click here for the results from the second round.

During the second round of voting, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son (owner of Sprint) surpassed CTIA’s Meredith Attwell Baker, T-Mobile’s John Legere moved ahead of FirstNet’s Sue Swenson, and Nokia’s Rajeevi Suri beat Frontier’s Dan McCarthy. But perhaps the most interesting matchups pitted Apple’s Tim Cook against Google’s Larry Page (Page won handily) and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos against Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Bezos won).

And Brian Roberts received 60 percent of the vote against Charlie Ergen’s 40 percent in a matchup that placed Dish Network’s sagging satellite pay-TV business against Comcast’s resurgent cable TV and internet offerings (Dish’s spectrum holdings didn’t appear to aid Ergen’s position).

Of course, these results are by no means comprehensive or scientific. Industry “power” can be evaluated through a number of metrics, from the overall size of a CEO’s company to his or her social media following. Nonetheless, as we move into the final four, we’ll see whether Fierce readers prefer Comcast’s Roberts over Google’s Page, or Softbank’s CEO over the chief executive of Cisco, among other matchups.

As in previous rounds, we’re using Polldaddy.com for the actual voting, and repeated voting is prohibited with a block to cookies and IP addresses. The third-round bracket is below, and below that are the actual matchups that you can vote on (polls on this round close at 11 a.m. Eastern time Thursday Dec. 15).

We hope you enjoy this feature, and don’t hesitate to let us know what you think. – Mike | @mikeddano