Ownership

A Verizon separation plan will reduce the company’s payroll by 10,400 employees, almost 7 percent of its workforce. The plan was announced earlier in 2018 and the reductions are part of a voluntary program to reduce Verizon’s headcount as they embark on a 5G focused restructuring. Since recently taking over the CEO helm, Hans Vestberg has embarked on a restructuring of the company, with a focus on seizing the 5G opportunity and reducing Verizon’s emphasis on legacy services. 

On Oct 23, 2018, Rep Jared Huffman (D-CA) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai regarding a forbearance petition filed on May 4 with the FCC by USTelecom. [USTelecom was seeking forbearance from the Communications Act's resale and unbundled network element requirements.] "The letters that my constituents submitted to the FCC regarding the petition illustrate the importance of alternative competitive providers in the telecommunications marketplace," Rep Huffman wrote. "I ask that their comments be carefully considered as you review the petition."

The big and powerful are getting bigger and more powerful — and the clear and dominant winners are big cities. With wealth, jobs, and power increasingly concentrated in a few large cities, we are witnessing a growing economic and political divide between urban and rural America. As we've previously written, it's part of a larger dynamic favoring "superstar" countries and companies, too — behemoths that appear positioned to dominate the future global economy. This fuels us-versus-them. New cool technologies hit cities first, be it 5G, autonomous transportation or drone delivery.

Social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans: One-in-five US adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers.

William P. Barr, nominated to become the nation’s top law enforcement official in the Trump administration, is a former chief lawyer for Verizon Communications who has opposed net neutrality rules for more than a decade. Barr, who served as attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush from 1991-93, warned in 2006 that “network neutrality regulations would discourage construction of high-speed internet lines that telephone and cable giants are spending tens of billions of dollars to deploy.”

Democrats and Google executives worked arm in arm for years, particularly during the Obama administration. But when Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, testifies before Congress, some of the toughest questioning is likely to come from Democrats. The hearing will provide an early glimpse of how Democrats plan to approach Silicon Valley giants in the coming year as they assume control of the House of Representatives.

President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Justice previously challenged the integrity and motivation of the agency’s current antitrust chief, according to recently published court documents, offering a conflicting account of a meeting the two attended about the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. Before the companies merged, Time Warner board member William Barr attended a meeting with the company’s general counsel and officials from the Justice Department’s antitrust division to discuss the mega-merger.

The Justice Department urged a federal appeals court to reconsider AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, arguing that the judge who approved the deal in June misunderstood fundamental economic principles and ignored how AT&T could unfairly extract higher fees from rivals by threatening to black out popular TV channels. The Department of Justice delivered oral arguments in its appeal of a lower court decision that handed the agency a major defeat in one of the most closely followed antitrust trials in decades.

Sen-elect Josh Hawley (R-MO), who launched investigations into top tech players like Google and Facebook during his tenure as Missouri attorney general, is already drawing backlash from the industry over his critical remarks. During an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Hawley took aim at tech companies over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a liability protection for online platforms cherished by the industry. “My question is, should they really be getting this special immunity from the government if they’re also going to act like censors?

Tumblr recently announced it will ban adult content.  Although partially in response to the discovery of a number of communities posting child pornography and subsequent ban of the Tumblr ap from the extremely important Apple ap store, a former engineer at Tumblr said the change has been in works for months. The change was mandated by Tumblr’s corporate parent Verizon, in order to attract greater advertising revenue.