AT&T confirmed to Axios it is planning widespread job cuts that include managers and executives, in addition to 3,400 technician and clerical jobs. It will also close 250 retail stores, impacting 1,300 retail jobs.
Why it matters: While the cuts can't be separated from the COVID-19 impact on the economy, the moves also come as the mobile industry has consolidated from four national players to three following T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint.
San Francisco's district attorney has filed a lawsuit against food delivery company DoorDash, accusing the company of misclassifying its drivers as contractors instead of employees.
Why it matters: This is the latest attempt by elected officials to force gig economy companies to relabel their workers. In May, California's attorney general, along with DA's from three cities sued Lyft and Uber over similar issues.
The right-wing financial blog ZeroHedge has been banned from generating revenue through Google's advertising platform after apparently violating the tech giant's policies on content related to race, a Google spokesperson confirmed to NBC News. Conservative news site The Federalist has also reportedly received a warning over its comment section, Business Insider reports.
Why it matters: The move is sure to invite fury from Republicans who claim that Big Tech companies stifle conservatives. President Trump signed an executive order last month aimed at softening protections from legal liability that online platforms enjoy over content moderation and user-posted material.
Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify, having sealed major deals with Facebook and now Walmart, is seizing the pandemic moment to put together a challenge to industry giant Amazon.
Driving the news: On Monday, Walmart said it will open its online marketplace, which reaches 120 million monthly visitors, to Shopify's more than 1 million business clients. That means Walmart shoppers will be able to find goods from some Shopify merchants.
Federal prosecutors said Monday that at least six former eBay employees engaged in a disturbing harassment campaign against the editor and publisher of a newsletter that covers the company.
The big picture: The must-be-read-to-be-believed court papers read like the script of a caper movie gone bad, and the incident appears to be at least a part of why the company parted ways with CEO Devin Wenig last September. At the time, eBay was also under pressure from activist investors over its slow growth.
T-Mobile customers endured a daylong service outage Monday that affected users nationwide.
Why it matters: Some had speculated that the issue was a more widespread attack on multiple internet services, but it looks like many of the problems reported at other carriers and internet services were tied to the T-Mobile outages — either calls that failed because they involved a T-Mobile customer or internet services that T-Mobile customers couldn't reach.
Last week, videoconferencing company Zoom sought to reassure global users that it would no longer shutter accounts outside of mainland China at Beijing's behest. But Zoom's struggle to please two governments with radically different ideologies is only just beginning.
Why it matters: U.S. tech companies with a significant presence in China face penalties or even expulsion from the country if they don't abide by Chinese government requests, and severe censure from U.S. civil society and government officials if they do.
For all the attention on Apple and Google's joint effort to help track COVID-19 exposure, adoption of the technology in the U.S. has been limited, especially compared to other countries.
Why it matters: The companies' exposure notification technology could augment the labor-intensive work of contact tracing that experts say is key to controlling the spread of a disease for which there is no treatment or cure.
Airbnb will set out to identify and measure racial discrimination experienced by users of its service through a new research project in partnership with Color of Change and other advisers.
Why it matters: “The reason we’re doing this is because we have not achieved our goal of reducing all bias and discrimination on our platform,” Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky tells Axios.
