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"A desperately needed wake-up call for a world that demands we keep tweeting, posting, and podcasting that proves the most important thing might be to shut up! By identifying the six types of overtalkers and the six principles to cure our babbling ways, STFU empowers us to become better at nearly every facet of our daily lives and in our most treasured relationships"--

"Examines how the ideas of Silicon Valley and its "new oligarchs" have changed work culture, making employees subject to constant change, dehumanizing technologies, and even health risks, and discusses how to restore the social contract between employers and employees."--

A memoir of life inside the tech bubble by a writer and co-producer for "Silicon Valley" describes how, after losing his magazine writing job, he took a position with a tech company rife with cultish millennials, absent bosses, and venture-capital amenities

The Financial Stability Oversight Council represented an innovative approach to the problem of systemic risk in the American economy. It also represented an innovative form of cooperative federalism. By grafting state regulators onto the Council as nonvoting members, Congress hoped this new federal super-regulator would draw upon a reservoir of state expertise and local knowledge so that the Council's final decisions reflected a collaborative effort between the nation's top experts at the federal and state level. But looking back over the first decade of the Council's operations, it is clear that this experiment failed to work as Congress intended. Federal decisionmakers consciously minimized the role of their state counterparts and asserted jurisdiction over America's largest insurance companies, stepping confidently into an industry that was historically the prerogative of the states over the objection of the Council's state regulator members. Ultimately, the D.C. district court vacated the Council's overreach, citing the very same arguments pressed by state regulators that were disregarded by the Council during its deliberations. By publicly dissenting from the Council's decisions, state regulators planted seeds of doubt that would ultimately lead the Council to abandon its efforts. The Council's foray into insurance regulation reflected not the collaborative consensus of cooperative federalism, but a more discordant process in which state officials work within a federal system to resist policies with which they disagree—a phenomenon known as "uncooperative federalism." This Article critically examines the role that state regulators could, and did, play during the Council's first decade of deliberations and explores the ramifications of that experience for theories of cooperative and uncooperative federalism. The Dodd-Frank Act's experiment with integrating state regulators at the federal decision-making level did not work as Congress hoped, but it inadvertently revealed a powerful way that states can use tools of administrative law to protect state autonomy from agency overreach through the administrative safeguards of federalism.

On the eve of independence, John Adams famously argued that ours should be "a government of laws and not of men." This warning should echo even more loudly through our current era, when the administrative state has eroded many of the structural safeguards designed to protect the rule of law. Strict judicial enforcement of the separation of powers and nondelegation has yielded to our faith in expert agencies to make important governance decisions. This tradeoff may be, in the Supreme Court's words, a necessary concession to an "increasingly complex society." But it highlights the importance of internal safeguards designed to preserve the rule of law within our agencies. For this reason, process reform is an important piece of Ajit Pai's legacy as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Upon assuming the chairmanship, Pai expressly named process reform as a key part of his strategic vision. He followed through on that commitment over the next four years, making much-needed improvements to enhance transparency, accountability, and robust, data-driven decisionmaking – and in the process strengthening the rule of law within an agency that seemed to have fallen into dysfunction. On the transparency front, these initiatives included a commitment to release draft orders to the public at the same time they are circulated internally – a welcome change that reduced the power of the chairman and special interests to manipulate the media cycle during the period before FCC votes on important items. Improvements in accountability included limiting the power of agency staff to make substantive edits to agency orders and to settle certain investigations without Commissioner approval. These changes helped shift power away from the permanent bureaucracy and to the more politically accountable agency heads. And Chairman Pai's commitment to data-driven decisionmaking is reflected in the creation of the Office of Economics and Analytics, which helped concentrate the FCC's economics talent and integrate it more systemically into the agency's operations. As a result of these and other reforms, the Commission is stronger than it was four years ago. But there remains work to be done. One hopes that President Biden will select a successor equally committed to rule of law principles.

On the eve of independence, John Adams famously argued that ours should be "a government of laws and not of men." This warning should echo even more loudly through our current era, when the administrative state has eroded many of the structural safeguards designed to protect the rule of law. Strict judicial enforcement of the separation of powers and nondelegation has yielded to our faith in expert agencies to make important governance decisions. This tradeoff may be, in the Supreme Court's words, a necessary concession to an "increasingly complex society." But it highlights the importance of internal safeguards designed to preserve the rule of law within our agencies. For this reason, process reform is an important piece of Ajit Pai's legacy as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Upon assuming the chairmanship, Pai expressly named process reform as a key part of his strategic vision. He followed through on that commitment over the next four years, making much-needed improvements to enhance transparency, accountability, and robust, data-driven decisionmaking – and in the process strengthening the rule of law within an agency that seemed to have fallen into dysfunction. On the transparency front, these initiatives included a commitment to release draft orders to the public at the same time they are circulated internally – a welcome change that reduced the power of the chairman and special interests to manipulate the media cycle during the period before FCC votes on important items. Improvements in accountability included limiting the power of agency staff to make substantive edits to agency orders and to settle certain investigations without Commissioner approval. These changes helped shift power away from the permanent bureaucracy and to the more politically accountable agency heads. And Chairman Pai's commitment to data-driven decisionmaking is reflected in the creation of the Office of Economics and Analytics, which helped concentrate the FCC's economics talent and integrate it more systemically into the agency's operations.

Like many popular tourist destinations, Boston benefits from the sharing economy. Innovative intermediaries such as Airbnb have helped middle-class residents supplement their incomes by monetizing their greatest assets: their homes. The new short-term rental market allows homeowners to keep up with rising living costs while providing additional capacity to attract tourists who contribute to the local economy. Also like many cities nationwide, Boston has struggled with the unintended consequences of this new marketplace. Policymakers are concerned that the new market is incentivizing owners to remove long-term rentals from the housing stock, particularly in popular and space-constrained areas like Chinatown. To mitigate this risk, a new City of Boston ordinance (City of Boston Code, Ordinances, § 9-14) requires homeowners to register short-term rental properties with the City and prohibits certain categories of properties from being offered as short-term rentals. But it is the enforcement mechanism that has drawn the most controversy. In addition to punishing individual homeowners who run afoul of the rules, the ordinance fines intermediaries like Airbnb $300 per day for each ineligible rental booked on the site. Presumably, the fine is designed to entice these intermediaries to police their sites for violations. But while this attempt to deputize Airbnb reduces the City's enforcement costs, it cuts against one of the fundamental tenets of Internet governance: that platforms generally are not liable for a user's misuse of a neutral tool. This immunity, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230, makes it possible for companies from eBay to Twitter to connect millions of users without having to monitor their every interaction for potential legal violations. In Airbnb v. City of Boston, 386 F. Supp. 3d 113 (D. Mass. 2019), the federal district court upheld the Ordinance against a Section 230 challenge, in a decision that weakens this core statutory protection and may have significant ramifications for the broader Internet economy.

In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIF Order), which repealed the Commission's two-year-old net neutrality restrictions. This action spawned a flurry of activity in state legislatures that sought to re-impose those restrictions at the state level and subject the RIF Order to a death by a thousand paper cuts. Nowhere was this state activity more prominent than California, where Senate Bill 822 became a vehicle for net neutrality advocates not only to resurrect the requirements of the now-defunct 2015 Open Internet Order, but also to impose additional regulations that even the Obama-era FCC had rejected. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department challenged SB-822 in federal court in California, arguing that federal law preempted the state's attempt to regulate the Internet from Sacramento. In response, California agreed to voluntarily stay enforcement of the statute while the D.C. Circuit heard Mozilla v. FCC, which was considering the validity of the FCC's RIF Order. For almost two years, California's bold net neutrality initiative has been in limbo, with supporters and critics alike waiting to see if the bill will ever amount to more than (in one commentator's words) a "publicity stunt." With the Mozilla litigation now complete, the day of reckoning is approaching – and the California court is likely to find that much, if not all, of SB-822 is preempted. At a minimum, the Communications Act expressly preempts most of the regulations that SB-822 places on wireless companies. More generally, the state law interferes with the carefully calibrated federal broadband policy determined in the RIF Order, and on that basis should face conflict preemption by the Supremacy Clause. These claims, which Mozilla left open, are fatal to much, if not all, of California's attempt to regulate broadband network management practices.

On April 1, T-Mobile USA officially completed its acquisition of Sprint Corporation. The milestone marked the end of a two-year regulatory review process that included settlement deals with two federal agencies, negotiations with myriad state regulators, and a trial court victory in a case brought by several state attorneys general who alleged the merger violated antitrust law. But this final chapter was not without last-minute drama. California, which played a leading role in last year's antitrust suit, had not approved the merger by the companies' self-appointed deadline. Instead, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) released a proposed decision approving the merger with significant conditions, and announced it would discuss the proposal in its own time, at its April 16 meeting. Rather than waiting around, the companies took action to sidestep the Commission's jurisdiction. Defying an explicit Commission order, they proceeded to complete the transaction without California's blessing. This article assesses the strength of the companies' claims to proceed without waiting for the California Commission's decision, and it concludes that the Commission may face an uphill battle in light of Ninth Circuit precedent. If California loses a confrontation with T-Mobile and Sprint in court over the extent of the CPUC's merger review authority, the state likely will have overplayed its hand, jeopardizing its future review of wireless mergers. And, significantly, such a decision may well impact the extent of other states' merger review authority as well.

While the Federal Communications Commission carries a diverse policy portfolio, one issue in particular remains at the top of consumers' collective mind year after year: reducing the number of unwanted robocalls. Robocalls have even become pernicious and pervasive enough to draw the Supreme Court's attention. Earlier this month, the Court decided Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, Inc. In that case, the Court struck down a portion of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 statute intended to protect consumers from robocalls, because it violated the First Amendment. Three days later, the court granted certiorari in a second case, Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, which involves interpretation of an ambiguous statutory definition within the TCPA. These follow on the heels of a third case, PDR Network LLC v. Carlton &Harris Chiropractic Inc., which was decided last year and involved a conflict between the FCC and the judiciary about a different TCPA provision. While the three cases come in very different postures, all are in some way wrestling with the statutory text – text that was awkward when written thirty years ago and has grown increasingly problematic over time. As technology advances and the world has grown ever more connected, the TCPA has proven increasingly incapable of solving the robocall problem. Recent FCC initiatives have shown the possibility of technical solutions to the robocall problem. Congress should update the TCPA to reflect the realities of the modern telecommunications marketplace, and consider focusing on technological solutions, rather than litigation, to protect American consumers.

In this written testimony submitted to the Connecticut Senate Energy and Technology Committee, Professor Lyons makes two arguments regarding Senate Bill No. 5. First, it is unlikely that Connecticut has authority to enact the bill's net neutrality provisions, as the bill conflicts with the Federal Communications Commission's carefully balanced regulatory approach and is probably preempted under the Supremacy Clause. Second, even if Connecticut could enact SB5, there are good arguments about why net neutrality and ISP-specific privacy rules are bad policy.

For nearly a century, state regulators played an important role in telecommunications regulation. The 1934 Communications Act gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to regulate interstate telephone service, but explicitly left intrastate calls—which comprised 98% of Depression-era telephone traffic—to state public utility commissions. By the late 2000s, however, as landline telephony faded to obscurity, scholars and policymakers alike recognized that the era of comprehensive state telecommunications regulation had largely come to an end.Perhaps surprisingly, however, the first years of the Trump Administration have seen a resurgence in state telecommunications regulation—driven not by state institutional concerns, but by policy disagreements over net neutrality. This Article addresses the broader federalism questions raised by this net neutrality clash. Part I provides an overview of telecommunications federalism from the 1934 Communications Act through the present day, looking at the division of federal and state jurisdiction over traditional telephone service, wireless telephony, and information services. Part II examines the various steps that states have taken to regulate broadband providers' network management practices in response to the Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom Order and assesses the likelihood that these initiatives will survive a federal preemption challenge. Part III looks more broadly at the question of state authority to regulate broadband network management practices. It discusses the statutory and constitutional limits on state power to regulate broadband providers. Once the sphere of potential authority is defined, Part IV addresses how states should exercise this power and highlights alternative tools available for states that wish to shape the net neutrality debate.

Earlier this week, the D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Mozilla v. Federal Communications Commission. The court affirmed the Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom (RIF) Order, identifying some flaws in the agency's reasoning but finding the agency could likely correct those errors on remand without vacatur. While chastened by the ruling, some net neutrality advocates have identified a potential silver lining. The court vacated the portion of the RIF Order that expressly preempted state and local broadband regulations. Advocates have latched onto this holding as permission for legislatures to reimpose at the state level the restrictions that the Commission repealed at the federal level. But these advocates are likely to be disappointed, as this reads too much into the court's decision. Any state effort to regulate broadband providers is still subject to conflict preemption on a case-by-case basis. The court recognized that the Order created a "light-touch" regulatory regime that relies on transparency and disclosure requirements against a backdrop of consumer protection and antitrust law to protect consumers, an approach that the court found reasonable. State laws that disrupt this carefully balanced federal policy are likely to be preempted—not by the RIF Order itself, but by the Supremacy Clause. In other words, it is unlikely that the courts will allow the Internet—which, by definition, cannot possibly be segregated into interstate and intrastate components—to be governed by state legislators or other local officials in Sacramento, California, or Montpelier, Vermont.