December 2016

Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign. In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000. Kushner told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was. The campaign then decided not to work as closely with CNN, and Trump ramped up his bashing of the cable network. He also told the crowd that Google and Facebook are now more powerful, and that The New York Times and CNN aren't as powerful.

T-Mobile employees under pressure to meet sales goals are sometimes driven to mislead customers or to enroll them in services they didn’t ask for, alleges a report from a labor coalition.

In a complaint that Change to Win said they filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the labor group claimed that T-Mobile sets “unrealistic sales targets” that encourage workers to act in ways that may not benefit consumers. The group found that some workers said they felt pressure to add insurance, phone lines and other services that customers didn’t explicitly ask for to meet sales targets and earn commission payments. The findings were based on a review of consumer complaints collected by the Federal Trade Commission, a consumer protection agency, interviews with workers and online surveys of people who identified themselves as T-Mobile employees and customers.

Dec 15, the small business exemption from the Title II Net Neutrality Order’s expanded reporting requirements expired. We worked hard to reach a consensus with our Democratic colleagues that would have prevented the exemption from lapsing. Unfortunately, those efforts did not bear fruit and now thousands of our nation’s smallest and most competitive Internet service providers are worried that they will be subject to unnecessary, onerous, and ill-defined reporting obligations. This was a lost opportunity for the Commission to do the right thing. It also ignores the strong bipartisan support from the House of Representatives, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the Obama Administration’s own Small Business Administration.

We note the exceptional leadership of Sens Daines (R-MT) and Manchin (D-WV), and House Commerce Chairman Walden (R-OR) on this matter. We appreciate the willingness of two of our colleagues to negotiate in good faith on a compromise. We remain committed to protecting small businesses and their customers from the higher costs and disproportionate impact that would accompany the implementation of these requirements, and we remain hopeful that a consensus exemption can still be achieved at the Commission in the months ahead in addition to reviewing the application of the overall burdens themselves.