Amazon raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its 350,000 employees last year “because it seemed like the right thing to do,” said CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday in his annual letter to shareholders. “Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” he said. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.” Best Buy, Walmart and Barnes & Noble didn’t comment. Best Buy pays $12 average hourly, Walmart $11.72, Barnes & Noble $10.63, according to the PayScale website.
An e-commerce company president pleaded guilty to “conspiring to fix prices for customized promotional products sold” to online U.S. customers, DOJ said Thursday. Gennex Media President Akil Kurji and co-conspirators agreed to fix prices as early as May 2014 until at least June 2016, Justice said. He faces 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine, and 11 defendants have been charged for illegal activity associated with products like wristbands, lanyards, temporary tattoos and buttons. “Kurji and his co-conspirators used social media platforms and encrypted messaging applications, such as Facebook, Skype, and Whats[A]pp, to reach and implement their illegal agreement,” Justice said.
Uber’s “continued success will come from stellar execution and the strength of the platform we have worked so hard to build,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an initial-public-offering SEC filing Thursday to raise $1 billion. Uber’s engineering and product teams “are solving some of the most difficult problems at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds,” he said. Uber’s 2018 revenue jumped 42 percent from 2017 to $11.27 billion and was 193 percent higher than 2016's $3.8 billion, said the filing. It had a $3.03 billion operating loss in 2018, 26 percent lower than in 2017, it said. Ex-Facebook executive Matt Cohler, general partner in venture capital firm Benchmark, is Uber's largest individual shareholder with 11 percent of the stock, it said.
Rather than breaking up big digital platform companies as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposes (see 1903280045), requiring they share information might be more effective at resolving problems, wrote former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday. He nonetheless said the 2020 presidential candidate's plan deserved attention. "Physical breakup of dominant companies," he wrote for the Brookings Institution, "may not be the only path to competition in a world where the tools of dominance are virtual rather than physical." Splitting them into "smaller clones may reduce their size, but each new company will still possess the virtual assets that enabled their parents’ anticompetitive activities in the first place: the databases full of information about you and I," wrote Wheeler, a visiting fellow. "Break open that hoard of digital information, make it available to innovators and competitors," he advised. "Requiring competitive interconnection to databases would have the effect of an 'internal break up' by going after the source of its market control." AT&T, Comcast, Facebook and Google are donors to Brookings and didn't influence this blog, the post said. Warren's office referred us to her campaign, which didn't comment. The Internet Association declined to comment.
Most consumers have heard of major vMVPDs, but few know what each offers, Hub Entertainment Research reported Wednesday. More than 80 percent recognize Hulu Plus Live TV, YouTube, DirecTV Now, Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. Fewer than half could identify the value proposition of each or how its offering differed from the others. Among digital media players, Apple TV led awareness at 92 percent, followed by Amazon Fire TV (89 percent), Roku (88 percent) and Google’s Chromecast (34 percent). Knowledge of what the players offer was far lower, with Roku leading at 40 percent clarity, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV at 38 percent each and Chromecast at 34 percent. The survey was conducted in January with 1,692 U.S. TV viewers living in a broadband household.
NTIA’s multistakeholder group “has reached broad consensus around the basic value of a software bill of materials,” the agency said Monday before its Thursday meeting (see 1904010057). The medical device industry delivered “a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the feasibility of an SBOM in practice.” NTIA hopes for other use cases across sectors. Office of Policy Analysis and Development Director-Cybersecurity Initiatives Allan Friedman wrote the update.
The FTC hasn’t become “inured” by privacy incidents, Chairman Joe Simons said Tuesday in prepared remarks for its policy hearing on consumer privacy (see 1904090073). In the past 20 years, the FTC brought hundreds of cases, conducted about 70 workshops and issued about 50 reports on consumer privacy, he said. The agency’s approach is “vigorous enforcement with every tool we have.”
Advertising industry groups launched a coalition Monday urging Congress to pass a federal, pre-emptive privacy law that creates a FTC Data Protection Bureau. Privacy for America was created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Digital Advertising Alliance, Interactive Advertising Bureau and Network Advertising Initiative. The coalition supports granting the FTC rulemaking authority.
A West Virginia man pleaded guilty to downloading child pornography over the dark web and transporting illegal material across state lines, DOJ said Friday. According to DOJ, Paul Joseph Wilson, 49, downloaded the illegal material and “subscribed to child-pornography-specific newsgroup services” while living and working at a Washington, D.C., school. Wilson also transported illegal material from D.C. to Virginia, DOJ said. Sentencing is July 12.
Pandora Now, launched Thursday as a SiriusXM channel and Pandora interactive station and playlist, is the first cross-platform initiative since SiriusXM completed its $3.5 billion all-stock Pandora buyout Feb. 1 (see 1902010005). Pandora Now “harnesses the combined strength of Pandora's extensive listener data and SiriusXM's curatorial expertise,” said the company. Bundling the SiriusXM and Pandora platforms is “a great area for combination,” because Pandora lacks a good "position" in the car, and SiriusXM "would like to do" better in the home and in mobile, SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said last month (see 1903120026).