Work from Home Winners and Losers?

Most technologies are complementary to others. We have a need for transportation, but many modes to fulfill that need. 

But one can always get a vigorous debate about the degree to which conferencing platforms can permanently replace face-to-face interactions. Nearly two thirds of all current jobs cannot be done remotely, a study by the U.S. National Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. Other studies also estimate that about 34 percent of jobs could be done entirely from home. 

That probably is not the point. Most people seem to agree that information and office workers will continue to do some work from home, some of the time, and likely more in the future than they have in the past. A related issue for firms and organizations is the degree to which conferencing can permanently replace travel and face-to-face meetings.

It might be fair to note that “Zoom fatigue” reflects the preferred communications methods workers express. A study sponsored by Adobe found that in-person communications by far tops videoconferencing, by about a 28:1 margin. 

That arguably is most important in new business relationships, where establishing trust is essential, and less important for internal company or organization meetings where relationships are well established. 

source: Adobe

We do not know the answer to the question of how effective remote work will be, in the future, compared to older patterns.

Many are optimistic about permanently changed work patterns, where many people spend more time working from home; less in the office. As always, there are likely to be winners and losers, as there always are whenever decisions are made. 

Based on prior research, it might be argued that younger workers, earlier in their career, are at greater risk than more-established workers.  “We argue that face time helps employees to receive better work and leads to career advancement,” researchers said in a 2018 study. 

“When employees are geographically distributed from managers who control the assignment of work, they are often unable to display face time,” and that can inhibit career progress, researchers say. To be sure, some might argue that videoconferencing is a form of “face time.” 

“Employees who work remotely may end up getting lower performance evaluations, smaller raises and fewer promotions than their colleagues in the office, even if they work just as hard and just as long,” said researchers Kimberly Elsbach and Daniel Cable. 

“Companies rarely promote people into leadership roles who haven’t been consistently seen and measured,” Jack and Suzy Welch have argued. “It’s a familiarity thing, and it’s a trust thing.”

“We’re not saying that the people who get promoted are stars during every ‘crucible’ moment at the office, but at least they’re present and accounted for,” the Welches say. 

To the extent that work from home becomes a full-time pattern for many workers, we should expect to see winners and losers. Younger workers and new hires might fare less well than more-established or older workers.

Financial Firms Begin Trek Back to the Office

About 50 percent of J.P. Morgan trading floor employees--especially senior staff--will return to their offices Sept. 21, 2020. 

The value of face-to-face interactions seems to be part of the rationale, as well as training of junior personnel. 

J.P. Morgan argues that staff “would lose their camaraderie and junior workers and the incoming class of analysts wouldn't get the training they need if the bank continues to operate remotely.” That is not an unfounded belief. In additional to the value of unintended employee interactions, some note that onboarding new employees is much more difficult when everyone is working from home. 

Goldman Sachs quickly followed the move and other financial firms are expected to follow as well. 

None of those trends should  be unexpected. The more people use technology as a replacement for face-to-face contact, the more they value and seek such contact.  

U.S. Courts Have Not Upheld Free Speech Censorship by Private Firms

Traditional legal doctrine has been that private actors are not constrained by the Constitution generally, under the “state action” doctrine, which holds that  “the First Amendment governs only governmental limitations on speech (Nyabwa v. Facebook, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13981, Civil Action No. 2:17-CV-24, *2 (S.D. Tex.) (Jan. 26, 2018).”

The state action doctrine holds that only the government or those acting on its behalf are subject to constitutional scrutiny. Non-governmental conduct therefore lies beyond the Constitutional protections.

On the other hand, the exercise of free speech has recently seemed to be invoked as a right by major league sports figures whose kneeling during the playing of the national anthem is said to be an exercise of free speech rights not traditionally protected by the First Amendment. 

“The time has come to recognize that the reach of the First Amendment be expanded,” says lawyer David Hudson.  

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this reality last year in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017): 

“While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace—the ‘vast democratic forums of the Internet’ in general, and social media in particular,” the U.S. Supreme Court has said in the case of Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S.Ct. 1730, 1735 (2017).

The argument is that social media networking sites have become the modern-day equivalent of traditional public forums like public parks and public streets. 

“Public communications by users of social network websites deserve First Amendment protection because they simultaneously invoke three of the interests protected by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association,” said Benjamin F. Jackson in a 2014 law review article (Benjamin F. Jackson, Censorship and Freedom of Expression in the Age of Facebook, 44 N.M. L. Rev. 121, 134 (2014)). 

“Federal courts can and should extend First Amendment protections to communications on social network websites due to the importance these websites have assumed as forums for speech and public discourse,” he argued. 

As with debates over network neutrality, where there arguably is a difference between permissible network management and other practices some argue are violations of the basic principle of free access to lawful internet apps and services. 

For example, social network websites may censor communications in order to prevent convicted criminals from preying on victims, accusers, or witnesses or prevent certain users from harassing or intimidating other users without violating free speech principles. 

Censorship of pornographic or violent materials likewise could help create and maintain an environment acceptable to users of as many ages and sensibilities. 

Also, censorship might be necessary to prevent harm to the website due to hacking and phishing attacks and comply with copyright and trademark laws.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Reno v. ACLU ( 521 U.S. 844 (1997) supports treating communications on social network websites as constitutionally protected speech. 

To be sure, application of First Amendment principles to private actors would raise the issue of impairment of their property rights. To use the telecommunications analogy, that would be similar to common carrier regulation of prices and terms of service. 

There is legal precedent. Under the public function exception, “the exercise by a private entity of powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State” constitutes state action (Jackson v. Metro. Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 352 (1974). That has not generally been a winning argument in the courts.

But it might be argued that social networks resemble the public spaces the Supreme Court has chosen to protect in both its public function exception (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946) and public forum doctrines.

The Supreme Court has held that the private property rights of a company did not “justify the State’s permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to restrict their fundamental liberties.”

The public forum doctrine was pioneered by Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization (307 U.S. 496 (1939) and Schneider v. Irvington (308 U.S. 147 (1939). Under the public forum doctrine, restrictions on speech in public spaces that have traditionally served as a venue for free expression and debate are subject to special constitutional scrutiny.

There also is an entwinement exception, though that also would face high scrutiny. Under the entwinement concept, a  non-governmental actor might be deemed a state actor if the firm has acted together with or has obtained significant aid from state officials, beyond mere licensing,  regulation or financial aid. 

Courts have thus far rejected claims that social network websites or their parent companies  show “entwinement.” Gilmore v. City of Montgomery, 417 U.S. 556, 569 (1974);

Can Free Speech Rights be Extended to Platforms?

Perhaps ironically, political protests by professional athletes might be opening a new legal avenue by those who seek to have fairness doctrines, equal time rules or other public interest requirements on social media platforms. Up tot his point, the U.S. constitution has protected speakers only from censorship by government entities.

But widespread private firm allowance of such political speech might widen the terrain for those who believe some new expansion of speech freedoms must be extended to powerful private platforms as well.

“Speakers in the United States have few or no legal rights when platforms take down their posts,” according to Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. 

Some use the analogy of must carry rules once imposed on TV broadcasters. To date, lawsuits likening platforms to “public forums” have failed. 

Also, there are different issues related to content: removal of items that violate terms of service, and the way that ranking systems operate. The former deals with removed content; the latter deals with search ranking algorithms. 

The former issue is similar to the ways stories are constructed by news media, for example. Are opposing views treated fairly and with neutral adjectives? Is the amount of space given to opposing views roughly equal? 

The latter is similar to the choice of stories to run, and not the way content is treated once a “publish” decision is made. Which stories are deemed newsworthy, and which are not?

So far, U.S. courts have held that private platforms do not have a legal obligation to carry user speech. Still, some argue that dominant platforms are de facto gatekeepers, and should be regulated as “essential providers” of political speech, or even utilities, with a common carriage obligation. 

But those claims of speaker rights also bump up against the First Amendment rights of the platforms as speakers. Ranking and removal of content is an exercise of editorial judgment, in other words. 

Largely unexamined--so far--are various methods of giving more control to platform users, says Keller. It is not easy, but some advocate more end user content control settings. The problem is that people disagree about what constitutes “hateful speech.”

Some may  want platforms to carry all legal speech. Others might simply prefer more curation, allowing civil dialogue. 

“One possible approach would let platforms act against highly offensive or dangerous content

but require them to tolerate more civil or broadly socially acceptable speech,” argues Keller. 

Again, the problem is disagreement about how to identify such offensive or dangerous content, and not simply because the censoring algorithm or reviewer simply disagrees with the expression of those views. The same sort of problems arise with efforts to apply “fairness doctrines” that essentially preserve the rights of the listener, rather than the speaker. And all such rules limit free speech rights of speakers and platforms. 

Another approach distinguishes between “hosted” content (allowing anyone to speak) and “recommended” content that appears in news feeds, for example. The former is more akin to a town square, the latter more akin to the “curated” news feeds or search results. 

Yet others might prefer some form of unbundling the ranking and sorting algorithms, allowing third parties to create their own curated feeds. None of these would be simple. None would be free of some limitations on free speech. And most could negatively affect the monetization models that make the platform services possible. 

And yet we might be moving in such directions in any case. The recent issue of political protests by professional athletes raises the issue of whether constitutional free speech rights actually have standing even in the case of private firms. 

Keyboard Made from Paper Operates Without Batteries or Power Sources

Devices that work using only ambient energy are interesting for many sensor or internet of things applications. But researchers also are experimenting with keyboards that require no external source of power, either. 

"MEC Platform" is Intriguing, if Difficult

Few terms are harder to define than "platform." Some define "platform" as the computer architecture and equipment using a particular operating system. So Windows or IoS or Android are platforms. Others might say a computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. 

Some might say cloud computing or virtual machines are platforms. Apple's App Store often is considered a platform. 

A platform also can be a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers. So eBay, Amazon.com, Uber, Airbnb and any advertising marketplace are platforms.

Some telcos are optimistic about prospects for multi-access edge computing, including the opportunity to function as a platform for edge computing. The MobiledgeX initiative is a good example of that belief. MobiledgeX hopes to build an ecosystem of developers able to use common global interfaces, telco data centers and integrated 5G access. 

source: MobiledgeX

The MEC is envisioned as being complementary to the current hyper-scale computing as a service platforms such as AWS Wavelength and Azure Edge Zone. The issue, as always, is how much value actually can be created by a telco-owned edge computing platform or even actual edge computing as a service. 

Already, hyperscalers are moving to create their own edge computing as a service offers. In those instances, telcos become providers of real estate services and connectivity, but not the platform for developers or actual edge computing as a service.

It remains at this point an open question whether, and to what extent, a MEC platform can be created, and what value any potential platform can provide.

It never is easy for any participant in an ecosystem to emerge in additional roles, and has historically been challenging for telcos. Edge computing might not prove much different.

Any Revenue Growth for Telecom in 2020?

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, many telecom service providers expected modest revenue growth. In 2020, most are likely to show flat to negative revenue and revenue growth. Many service providers now expect revenue shrinkage instead. 

But the longer-term trend will reassert itself fairly quickly, in all likelihood, as global revenue growth has been pretty close to flat for some years. 

source: IDC

Overall, the global industry might not even hit one percent revenue growth in 2020. 

source: STL Partners 

International Voice Shrinks 5% a Year

Researchers at Omdia estimate that international wholesale voice revenue will continue to decline at a compound average rate of growth  of -4.8 percent through 2021 (and likely beyond) under the threat from over-the-top voice and messaging services. That trend was not completely clear 20 years ago, as the number of people using phones has grown dramatically. 

Since then, especially as voice and messaging alternatives have grown, with declines starting in the U.S. market about 2001, and elsewhere about 2003. 

source: The Economist

In the monopoly era, it was principally such revenues that produced most of the profits in the telecom industry, and provided the surplus to support consumer services that, in many cases, actually lost money. 

The industry long ago ceased to rely on international voice as the key revenue source. By the 1990s, mobile services had taken the place of international voice as the key revenue growth driver. More recently, text messaging and internet access have taken the place of mobile voice growth. 

A similar trend can be noted for European Union mobile revenues between 2010 and 2018, a period of less than a decade, but still a time when voice revenue dropped from about 80 billion euros to about 45 billion euros, while messaging dropped from about 19 billion euros to perhaps 10 billion euros and mobile internet access grew from about 18 billion euros to perhaps 42 billion euros.

In the U.S. market, long distance voice still provided nearly half of all U.S. telco revenues. By 2007, mobility had grown to about half, while long distance had shrunk to about 18 percent. 

source: FCC

What comes after mobility is a big question. 

What to Do about Dominant Platforms?

Big digital platforms, especially Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, are facing growing scrutiny about monopoly power and censorship. Consider the matter of political censorship, complaints which are growing louder.

Traditionally, the right of free speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, protects speakers from government censorship, but only government action. There is a long legal history that extended First Amendment protections to new electronic media.

The internet, though, and particularly the rise of social media platforms, seems to raise entirely new questions, such as whether free speech rights can, or ought to, be extended to protect citizens from censorship by private corporations. That is almost entirely new ground, and up to this point, the right of free speech does not exist on any social platform in the United States. 

But some believe the traditional right of free speech, protecting citizens from government censorship, should be expanded in an era where “certain powerful private entities—particularly social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others—can limit, control, and censor speech as much or more than governmental entities,” argues David L. Hudson Jr., Justice Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The issue is whether it is possible to enlarge the space within which constitutional protections on free speech are expanded, yet also avoid damage to private property rights of platforms. And that is the issue. It is not clear that regulation can do so, whether the issue is a remedy for business monopoly or the promotion of free speech. 

You might think the simplest answer is to simply allow people to speak their minds, with the exceptions of harassment and intimidation, threats of violence or promotion of criminal acts. But therein lies the problem, given the aggressively uncivil behavior one now sees on social media.  

What one speaker sees as the free expression of ideas will be seen as aggression and threat from another. Some 30 years ago this was not really a problem. People were simply more polite. But it is hard to mandate polite behavior. 

Many solutions seem to require “more regulation of platforms” which tends to mean “less freedom” for platforms, if arguably in pursuit of “more freedom” for speakers. And that raises an old issue: “who” has the right of free speech and its benefits, the speaker or the reader or listener. 

The U.S. Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, provided that “Congress shall make no law” prohibiting the free exercise of speech or the press. Note the language, which protects people as speakers and the “press” as a speaker from government restriction. 

Later broadcast media regulations sometimes shifted the focus a bit to the rights of listeners or viewers, rather than speakers. Generally speaking, however, the protected right is held by “speakers,” not “audiences.” 

Perhaps the seminal case was Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (395 U.S. 367, 393 (1969), which allowed some content regulation of broadcasting for reasons of promoting the public interest. The point is that speaker rights were somewhat subordinated to the rights of viewers and listeners (the public interest). 

Complicating matters further is the issue of “who” the speaker is, in the context of a social media site or business: the platform or the users of the platform. Up to this point, it is the rights of the platform as “the speaker” which have been upheld, even if a platform supposedly is a neutral matchmaker between users who might, arguably, be considered the actual “speakers.”

The approach prioritizing the rights of audiences (listeners, readers, hearers) is exemplified by Alexander Meiklejohn’s book Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government, in which he says “what is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”

All that assumes a singular public interest could even be identified.

It will not be easy to create a workable framework that expands the realm within which free speech protections exist on platforms, as the temptation will be to limit platform freedom to create more freedom of speech for users of platforms. But one philosophical choice might have to be made.

Is it the platform which has the right of free speech or is it platform users who have that right? And even if it is determined that platform users have the right, is it the speakers or the viewers, readers and listeners whose rights are to be protected?

Beyond all that, how algorithms or systems can be designed to accomplish, in neutral fashion, any of those goals also remains an issue.

Big and Permanent Changes in Enterprise IT Priorities Post Covid?

With the caveat that intentions often do not match actual behavior, large enterprise professionals who are heavy cloud computing customers have post-Covid-19 priorities that have changed from pre-Covid levels. You would not be surprised if effort to support remote work had increased, for example. 

But the differences, while showing some shifts, do not appear to have changed key priorities, or even the relative importance of various objectives. And since budgets and effort are essentially a zero-sum game, increased effort in some areas is matched by decreased effort in other areas. 

source: Second Watch

The survey included 100-plus cloud-focused information technology directors at companies with at least $500 million in annual sales and IT budgets of at least $50 million per year, from many industries including technology, financial services, manufacturing, retail, oil and gas, life sciences, consumer packaged goods and media and entertainment, all using at least two different cloud platforms. 

The point is simply that post-Covid behavior might not change as much as many now anticipate.

No "New Normal" for 5G Searches

One frequently hears these days that a “new normal” has been created by the Covid-19 pandemic; that “nothing will be the same” afterwards. That is not to deny either a “temporary” change in behavior nor a step change in many aspects of life and business, where it comes to underlying trends. 

We incontestably are behaving in different ways, partly the result of government mandates which are expected to be temporary. What happens after the pandemic is the issue. We should certainly expect a reversion to mean. Whatever trends were in place before the pandemic will reassert themselves, albeit from a higher level in many cases.

But that might not mean the rate of change changes very much. In fact, one might argue we already have seen this. This is a graph of Google searches for “5G.” Note the spike. That happened in March 2020 as many U.S. locations went into work-from-home and stay-home-from-school rules. 

We have to guess at why the surge in searches happened, then so quickly receded, but a reasonable guess is that people were looking for remote work support solutions. But the spike only lasted from the end of March to mid-April. Then interest backed off to levels higher than before, but on the prior trend line. 

As hard as it might be to envision, that is likely to happen with many business, economic and personal trends, post-pandemic, and after a few years. Consider “remote work.”

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, statistics on remote work are impressive enough to convince many observers that a fundamental and permanent shift has been made. We will know in five years whether that is an accurate assessment, but we also have to remember that “remote work” includes many disparate activities, many of which do not substantially affect the amount of time people actually spend at work places. 

Work from home statistics often include actions such as “taking home some work from the office” (ranging from reading documents to correspondence management), working while traveling on business, unscheduled and episodic work from home, routine and planned work from home as well as permanent, full-time remote office or at-home workspaces.

Long-term trends in office space requirements, for example, typically depend on the amount of full-time, permanent basing at home locations, as well as permanent work-at-home for days per week or month. 

One issue is how many jobs theoretically could be done entirely from home. “We estimate that 56 percent of the U.S. workforce holds a job that is compatible (at least partially) with remote work,” say researchers at Global Workplace Analytics. That noted, pre-Covid-19, “only 3.6 percent of the employee workforce works at home half-time or more, the firm notes. 

Using every definition of work from home, including casual “take work home with you,” Gallup data from 2016 shows that 43 percent of the workforce works at home at least some of the time. So much hinges on the shift of the workforce to work from home at least 50 percent of the time.

 source: Global Workplace Analytics

How Much More Legacy Services Revenue Growth Remains?

How much revenue growth is possible in telecom markets across the globe, looking at fixed and mobile connectivity, entertainment video and fixed-mobile convergence?

A.T. Kearney believes that in Western Europe, there is room to grow revenues 25 percent. In  Eastern Europe about 10 percent growth in legacy services remains. In Russia there is about six percent upside remaining.

In the United States there is about eight percent opportunity remaining. In Asian Pacific countries there is about 11 percent more upside. 

Beyond that, much hinges, apparently, on the ability to create video, audio, content or connected device businesses, in most of those markets. Upside in new businesses such as those are most limited in Western Europe and the United States, both mature markets. 

source: A.T. Kearney

Also, the U.S. market also faces the challenge of high spending on connected services, possibly indicating that much of the opportunity already has been seized (not adjusting for purchasing power parity, a way of normalizing spending across countries). 

Most of the potential future growth, in AT. Kearney’s view, will come from other roles in the connected services ecosystem, in such areas as online media, entertain­ment services and connected devices. 

The rub is such moves imply that firms must compete with firms already possessing significant advantages. In a U.S. context, for example, that could mean taking on Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google and others. In other countries it means taking on media giants. 

And that might be the greatest challenge of all, as most apps or services requiring use of connectivity can be created and delivered without the permission of the internet service provider. 

source: A.T. Kearney

“In every region of the world, video-on-demand services generate the largest chunk of digital services spend,” the firm argues. “Music and online gaming tend to be the next biggest generators of revenue.”

Globally, consumers spend an average of €8 per month on video-on-demand, €4 per month on music, and €4 on gaming, for example. In absolute terms, people in the United States and Western Europe spend the most on video-on-demand services at €14 and €10 per month respectively, well ahead of spending on music, gaming, and other services. In Asia Pacific, spending on digital services is more evenly spread across categories. 

source: A.T. Kearney

But some mobile service providers--including Verizon and T-Mobile, believe 5G gives them an opportunity to take existing market share from incumbent suppliers. Verizon, for example, will offer a 5G fixed wireless home broadband service that competes with Charter Communications and Comcast offers. 

Company	Price per Month	Download Speed in Megabits Per Second	Contract?
Charter Communications	$49.99	100 mbps	1-year contract required
Comcast	$49.99	200 mbps	1-year contract required
Verizon	$50	300 mbps	No contract

source: Motley Fool 

Those posted prices are for Verizon wireless customers. Others will pay $70 a month. There are other subtleties, though. The cable companies require customers to rent home equipment, generally adding about $10 a month in extra fees, and often require contracts as well, so the recurring cost is very close, even for non-Verizon mobile customers. 

Still, if Verizon were able to cross-sell even 10 percent of its mobile customers 5G Home at $50 per month, that would generate $5.6 billion in annual revenue for the company. That is a good example of how a big telco can capture that eight percent growth remaining in the legacy business.

What Verizon does next is the issue, as it seems to be approaching the limits of revenue growth from legacy services.