Labor

[Commentary] House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has tried to argue that ending network neutrality is good for Nashville’s musicians, but she’s flat wrong. She says that musicians would have the opportunity to negotiate “paid prioritization deals,” but this is just payola with a new name and the same ugly consequences for music.

Working musicians want to spend their time making and distributing music to their fans, not cutting special deals with big media conglomerates; allowing paid prioritization and other forms of discrimination is only good for big media companies that can afford to cut big checks. That’s why organizations like the Future of Music Coalition oppose what the Federal Communications Commission is trying to do. It’s critical that musicians stand up for net neutrality and oppose the FCC’s plan.

[E. Michael Harrington is a composer, musician, consultant, Music Business Program Faculty Chair at SAE Institute Nashville, course author and faculty at Berklee College of Music]

A group of more than 100 YouTube stars is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to preserve its network neutrality rules, which are currently in the process of being repealed. In an open letter, 132 internet entertainers said that eliminating the rules could imperil their industry. “Online video traffic already represents over 70% of all global web traffic and is estimated to grow to over 80% of all traffic by 2020,” the letter reads. “Our rapidly growing industry employs hundreds of thousands of people and yet it barely existed more than a decade ago. As creators in this fast-moving industry, changes to the existing Net Neutrality rules would have an outsized impact on our field and jeopardize our livelihood.” Among the acts signing the letter are Benny Fine of Fine Brothers Entertainment, a group that runs a popular comedy video channel on YouTube and other platforms. The Fine Brothers have 15.7 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Also signing on to the letter is Dane Boedigheimer, whose web series the Annoying Orange has nearly 6 million Youtube subscribers.

This study evaluates the estimated impact of the Federal Communications Commission’s recent efforts to remove barriers to investment into next-generation wireless and wireline broadband networks, and thereby to accelerate the transition from legacy copper networks to next-generation services.

We estimate that these proposed changes could have a significant impact not only on new wireless and wireline broadband infrastructure investment, but could also positively impact job creation, economic output and consumer welfare. Our models forecast that with these new rules in place, up to an incremental 26.7 million premises would become economical to serve with next generation networks, driving up to $45.3 billion in capital investment. This investment would be made by incumbent service providers across the country and is expected to take place over at least five years.

Editorial staffers at The New York Times will stage a walk-out from the newsroom on June 29 to protest potential layoffs and staff reductions, according to an announcement from their union. "New York Times editors, reporters and staff will come together to leave the newsroom and their offices in protest of management’s elimination of copy editors," reads the NewsGuild of New York announcement. "After a year and a half of uncertainty about their futures, New York Times editors and staff have expressed feelings of betrayal by management. The staff has been offered buyouts and if a certain number of buyouts is not reached, layoffs will ensue for the editorial staff and potentially reporters as well." Recently, NewsGuild President Grant Glickson penned an open letter to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet to share how the union feels about the layoffs, calling it a "humiliating process" and noting that the number of editors being let go "dumbfoundingly unrealistic."

In job ads, some employers have begun listing “digital native” as a requirement for the position. The term, many say, is a “code word” for young workers who have grown up with technology and will be able to use new systems with ease. This term plays into stereotypes that “digital immigrants” — usually older workers who came of age before the Internet — will be slow to adapt to technology, reluctant to learn and costly to train.

Older workers are sometimes labeled as “technophobic,” said Sara Czaja, director of the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement. But contrary to stereotypes, research does not show a correlation between age and work performance. If tasks are based on speed and accuracy, Czaja conceded that age may play a factor in an employee’s productivity. A 2010 study of adults aged 65-85 found that the majority of participants had a positive attitude toward using technology.

[Commentary] Sharing economy companies have had no shortage of regulatory battles, but companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit are innovating and improving regulation by incorporating the very trust created through their platforms. Arun Sundararajan, author of “The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism” (MIT Press, 2016), observes that regulation need not originate with the government. He writes that it can take a myriad of forms while still being rational, ethical, and participatory. He describes three models of regulation used by sharing platforms: peer-to-peer, self-regulatory, and data-driven delegation.

The way that sharing economy platforms are innovating regulation with digital trust systems exposes the effort by digital elites to impose Title II utility regulation from 1934 on the internet as backward and out of date. While sharing economy entrepreneurs are creating a decentralized, innovative, and distributed world and are finding and transforming passive assets into productive ones, Title II advocates want to centralize and aggregate power beneath a single government agency that we the people have never authorized to regulate broadband. We should resist this like we would any faction that wants to usurp power. Meanwhile, we should encourage the Federal Communications Commission and Internet service providers to experiment with these innovative forms of regulation.

[Roslyn Layton is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is also a member of the Trump FCC Transition Team.]

President Donald Trump vowed to cut back on "job-killing" regulations on the tech industry in a meeting with business executives. President Trump met with leaders from the drone and broadband industries at the White House, the latest event in the administration's "tech week." “We want to remain number one in certain areas,” President Trump said. “We’re going to give you the competitive advantage that you need." “My administration has been laser focused on removing government barriers to job growth and prosperity. We’ve created a deregulation task force to find wasteful, intrusive and job-killing regulations, which there are many,” he continued.

Execs from AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and General Electric joined representatives from drone and venture capital firms attended the meeting, titled “American Leadership in Emerging Technology.” The administration has been soliciting recommendations on tech policy and modernizing government IT from industry CEOs. The execs discussed drones, 5G wireless broadband, the so-called Internet of Things and financing emerging technology in three breakout sessions prior to their meeting with the president in the East Room of the White House.

A former CenturyLink employee claims she was fired for blowing the whistle on the telecommunications company's high-pressure sales culture that left customers paying millions of dollars for accounts they didn't request, according to a lawsuit filed in Arizona state superior court. The company's shares fell the most in six weeks on the news, while the shares of merger partner Level 3 Communications Inc. also dropped sharply.

The plaintiff, Heidi Heiser, worked from her home for CenturyLink as a customer service and sales agent from August 2015 to October 2016. The suit claims she was fired days after notifying Chief Executive Officer Glen Post of the alleged scheme during a companywide question-and-answer session held on an internal message board. The complaint alleges CenturyLink "allowed persons who had a personal incentive to add services or lines to customer accounts to falsely indicate on the CenturyLink system the approval by a customer of new lines or services." This would sometimes result in charges that hadn't been authorized by customers, according to the complaint.

As Silicon Valley is increasingly bifurcated into haves and have-nots, labor rights activists are becoming more vocal about the need for these tech companies to “make the world a better place” for the tens of thousands of low-wage contract laborers that make it possible for technology companies to function. The situation among Silicon Valley’s low-wage contract workers has become so perilous that in January, thousands of security guards working at immensely profitable companies like Facebook and Cisco followed the shuttle-bus drivers and voted to unionize in an effort to collectively bargain for higher wages and better benefits. The upcoming labor contract negotiations between the roughly 3,000 security guards (represented by SEIU United Service Workers West) and their employers is one of the biggest developments in Silicon Valley labor organizing to happen in 2017.

Empirical research demonstrates that the Obama Administration’s aggressive regulatory agenda at the Federal Communications Commission reduced investment in the telecommunications sector between $20 and $40 billion annually, robbing the nation of a boom in network expansion the public wants and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act mandates.

As there is a direct relationship between network investment and jobs, the next logical question to ask is how this reduced network investment affected employment in the telecommunications sector. Using standard economic techniques and publicly-available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ford finds that over the period 2010-2016, the telecommunications sector lost approximately 100,000 jobs per year—many of them high-paying union jobs. This loss is the pay-equivalent of about 130,000 “average” US jobs.