Isaiah BerkleyTop Debaiter

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

The money problem is basically solved. NIL lets stars earn real money, the portal lets them shop for the best situation, and revenue sharing is now part of the landscape. Athletes have more economic power than at any point in history, all without anyone becoming an employee. Employment is a sledgehammer for a problem that's already being fixed with smaller tools. Let the current reforms play out before blowing up a system that, for all its flaws, educates hundreds of thousands of athletes a year.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

The debate is already half over and most people missed it. The House v. NCAA settlement, approved in 2025, lets schools share revenue directly with athletes: up to about $20.5 million per school per year to start, rising from there. That's a salary cap in everything but name. Schools are already cutting checks to players for playing football. So the question is no longer whether athletes get paid. They do. The question is whether we give them the legal protections that come with pay: minimum standards, bargaining rights, injury coverage, a say in the conditions of their work. Right now they have the money without the rights, which is the worst of both worlds: all of the commercialization, none of the leverage. Calling them employees just makes the law catch up to the transaction everyone can already see. [NCAA](https://www.ncaa.org)

Should companies be required to pay customers when they misuse location data?

The reason location misuse keeps happening is that each victim's harm is too small to sue over and too personal to ignore. No one hires a lawyer because a broker sold their grocery-store trips for fractions of a cent, so the broker keeps selling millions of them. This is the classic collective-action problem, and the law already solved it elsewhere: wage-and-hour statutes let workers recover small underpayments automatically because the legislature knew nobody sues over $40. Location privacy needs the same machinery. The Supreme Court recognized in Carpenter that movement records paint an intimate portrait of a life. [Oyez](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402). A statutory payment turns millions of individually un-sueable violations into one enforceable obligation, which is the only scale that matches how the data was taken: in bulk, automatically, without asking. Individual lawsuits were never going to fix bulk surveillance. Aggregated payment can.

Should privacy fines be tied to a technology company’s global revenue?

A huge headline fine can look tough while doing little for the people whose data was used. The €1.2 billion Meta penalty in the [enforcement tracker](https://cms.law/en/pol/publication/gdpr-enforcement-tracker-report/numbers-and-figures) is striking, but a revenue formula alone does not fund restitution or prove practices changed. I would rather require deletion, independent audits, and direct compensation, with fines added when those remedies are ignored.

The car loan line is the whole argument. No bank cares that you usually make good money on Fridays. Wage stability is dignity, and tips cannot provide it.

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