Media site Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman, Y Combinator president, said a Reddit news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1ovvKqP). Venture capitalists Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital) and Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz) also participated in the financing round, it said. The funding will be used to hire additional staff and to develop the company’s technical infrastructure, it said. Reddit is also considering creating its own cryptocurrency that would be backed by company stock and distributed among Reddit users, said CEO Yishan Wong in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1qSmYTf). The proposal is in its “earliest stages” and “could totally fail,” he said. Wong said the company has to overcome some financial, legal and technical hurdles before establishing such a currency.
The deadline for submitting Form 477 broadband deployment data was extended because of “significant and unanticipated” technical issues in the FCC’s filing system on Sept. 26, the Wireline Bureau said in a public notice in Tuesday’s Daily Digest (http://bit.ly/1ovVALd). The deadline had been Oct. 1. The bureau said it will announce the new filing deadline when the problems are resolved.
City Brand International, of Shenzhen, China, joined the DVD Copy Control Association, the group told the Justice Department and the FTC in written notifications Sept. 4, said a notice in Tuesday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1v18rc0). Six companies also have withdrawn from the DVD CCA, the notice said. They are Eclipse Data Technologies, of Pleasanton, California; Hitachi, of Tokyo; Hong Kong Asa Multimedia, of Hong Kong; Marubun, of Tokyo; MediaCore, of Gyeonggi-Do, South Korea; and Nutron International, of Guangdong, China. The notifications were filed for the purpose of extending the DVD CCA and its members the antitrust protections afforded by the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993, the notice said.
The Chamber of Digital Commerce (CDC) received its 501(c)(6) tax-exempt, nonprofit status from the IRS, said a CDC news release Tuesday. “This recognition adds legitimacy to our efforts to guide policy makers in sensitively and intelligently addressing blockchain technology,” said CDC President Perianne Boring in the release. The CDC and the Heritage Foundation are hosting a panel on bitcoin regulations Wednesday (http://herit.ag/ZUl9Qw). The CDC created a political action committee last month (WID Aug 26 p9).
Advertising industry groups revealed an initiative to target ad fraud, ad malware and intellectual property (IP) piracy, in a Tuesday news release (http://bit.ly/Zp0FiT). The initiative will have a separate board and executives from each of three ad groups -- the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), they said. The groups said they'll work on industry principles to combat illicit activity and develop industry adoption incentives. “Criminal activity threatens to erode trust in the digital ecosystem,” said IAB President Randall Rothenberg. “Quality, original content is not sufficiently protected against the threats of fraudulent traffic, malware attacks and IP piracy, and it is time that publishers, marketers and agencies stand together to combat these dangerous forces as a unified entity.” The Senate earlier held a hearing during which lawmakers lambasted industry efforts to curb malware delivered through ads (WID May 16 p5).
Consumer Watchdog endorsed Focus on the User, a new website (http://bit.ly/YOAukr) and widget that highlights Google’s favoring of its own services on local search results, said a Consumer Watchdog news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1teq31T). The website is an “important way to educate consumers and policymakers about Google’s unfair search practices,” said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog privacy project director. “The widget gives best results if searches are done on one of Google’s European domains,” said Consumer Watchdog. Google didn’t comment.
Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) issued a draft decision Tuesday that would approve Frontier Communications’ proposed $2 billion purchase of AT&T’s broadband, video and wireline assets in the state. PURA proposed to accept the deal in conjunction with the public interest settlement agreement Frontier reached in August with the offices of state Attorney General George Jepsen and Consumer Counsel Elin Swanson Katz, along with additional commitments Frontier made after PURA rejected the initial settlement (http://bit.ly/1wVtPRE). Jepsen’s and Katz’s offices had urged PURA to accept the settlement with Frontier’s additional commitments. PURA denied as “untimely” the Connecticut Internet Service Providers Association’s (CTISPA) request that the regulator require Frontier to begin offering DSL service to ISP users separately from phone service when ISPs buy wholesale DSL transport. PURA said CTISPA can petition the regulator to consider the issue. PURA also denied Connecticut Light and Power’s (CL&P) request that it require AT&T to pay for $9.25 million in storm cleanup costs before the Frontier deal closes, saying the regulator doesn’t have statutory authority to interpret the issue. PURA suggested CL&P seek relief in court or through another state agency. The settlement terms and additional commitments will be incorporated into a final decision that PURA plans to issue Oct. 15. Written exceptions to the draft decision are due at 4 p.m. on Oct. 7, while oral arguments on the draft decision are to be at 10 a.m. Oct. 14 in Hearing Room 1 at PURA’s New Britain headquarters.
Two of three LECs have reduced congestion at interconnection points they have with Level 3 since March, but it’s hardly a promising sign for an open Internet, said Level 3 Vice President-Content and Media Mark Taylor in a blog post Tuesday (http://bit.ly/YNYQea). Congestion for the two LECs, which he did not name, improved only because they “forced Netflix to pay to interconnect directly with them,” the post said. Netflix signed the deal “because they had no choice: all third-party content that LEC broadband users want to see eventually has to go through LEC interconnection points. When the LEC tries to turn these interconnection points into Internet tollbooths there is no alternate path for the content to take to reach the consumers,” said Taylor. Broadband providers are offering “'Not’ Neutrality: a competitive distortion made possible by the monopoly control they have over access to their customers,” he said. “These broadband providers are willing to degrade the performance of the service they sell to their customers to extract arbitrary access charges, discriminate against third-party Internet content and harm competition."
The FCC has been using “sandbox thinking,” used in the technology sector to test out ideas in practice, but the agency needs to do more, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told the Democracy Symposium Tuesday, according to prepared remarks posted by the agency (http://bit.ly/1mMLv0X). Citing broadcast channel-sharing in Los Angeles and AT&T’s IP trials, she said that “this sandbox thinking is yielding dividends -- at the FCC and in the communications sector. But we need to expand it.” Rosenworcel said that “if we need our regulatory state to be more agile and more innovative, why not take a page from technology itself?"
PayPal will spin off from eBay into an independent, publicly traded company by the second half of 2015, eBay said in a Tuesday news release (http://bit.ly/YI3jzo). Dan Schulman will become PayPal’s CEO after the separation. Schulman for the past four years has been president of the American Express Enterprise Growth Group.