Image: Lee Mette / The Noun Project / Protocol
Being a media company used to be cool. Now everyone wants out.

Good morning! This Tuesday, why big telecoms can't wait to get out of the media business, what Parler looks like now that it's back on the App Store, why California is investigating Tesla, and the next tech companies in line to go public.
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A few years ago, the only thing to do if you ran a massive communications company was to try and get into the media game. Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, imagining a web-delivered future of entertainment. T-Mobile bought Layer3, and announced "plans to Un-carrier your TV," whatever that meant. Sprint spent years trying to make Sprint TV a thing. And of course, nobody went harder at the entertainment business than AT&T, which bought DirecTV and Time Warner for well over $100 billion in total.
What ISPs really wanted was to avoid being "dumb pipes," interchangeable infrastructure with no reason for customers to stick around as it got easier to switch carriers. But then two things happened: It didn't really get easier (or more popular) to switch carriers, and the business of being a dumb pipe started to explode thanks to 5G.
For now, 5G is everything. The opportunity is so big that the ISPs will spend the next few years focused on it. But this industry goes in waves, and you'd better believe we're only a few years away from AT&T's splashy acquisition of some AR entertainment startup for way too much money.
Speaking of focus: Now that WarnerMedia is out of AT&T and merging with Discovery, the new corporate mashup might have a real chance to thrive in the streaming wars, Protocol's Janko Roettgers writes. Discovery still has those pesky cable channels to care about, but fundamentally this is now a giant focused on content and streaming, not dabbling in dial-up.
The most recent elections made it clear: Voters in both political parties support higher wages. The federal minimum wage hasn't changed in 12 years, despite significant cost-of-living increases. Amazon saw the need to do more for their employees and communities and in 2018 raised their starting wage to at least $15 an hour.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said he's hoping more companies challenge SpaceX going forward:
Peter Thiel is spending big on Republican Senate candidates, and former Arizona House speaker Kirk Adams said it's being noticed:
Hugo Barra is leaving Facebook after four years on its Reality Labs team. His next move will be in health care tech, he said, because "society is still poorly equipped with the tools people need to really understand our health and gain control over our health outcomes."
George Farmer is the new CEO of Parler, taking over from interim chief Mark Meckler as the app makes its return to the App Store.
Peeyush Nahar is leaving Uber to run Marcus, Goldman Sachs's consumer-facing bank. Nahar also did a long stint at Amazon before running a lot of Uber's financial services teams.
Monday.com is going public, and filed its F-1 yesterday. Here's everything you need to know about the IPO.
Redbox is also going public, through a SPAC. It's valued at $693 million, and while yes, it's getting into streaming, it also believes DVDs ain't dead yet.
A brief throwback to "NFT of the Day" to bring you this: A new Fox series, called "Krapopolis," will apparently be "the first-ever animated series curated entirely on the Blockchain." Do you know what that means? No, seriously, we're asking.
Best we can tell, "Krapopolis" — from Dan Harmon, the creator of shows like "Community" and "Rick and Morty" — will just be a regular TV show. But it will also have a store that sells NFTs and other digital collectibles. Because this is 2021, and that's just what we do now.
"This is the first time in my life that I have dental insurance, vision insurance, [and] life insurance." Making more than $15 an hour and comprehensive benefits gives Leonardo and Amazon employees like him peace of mind and the freedom to do more — like go back to school.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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