Cryptocurrency-focused company Coinbase announced Thursday it has filed confidentially with regulators to go public. It does not specify whether it plans an initial public offering or other listing route.
Why it matters: Coinbase is among the best-known companies in the industry and a long-rumored candidate for a public listing. Bitcoin's price hit a new record on Thursday, surging above $23,000.
Bitcoin yesterday topped $20,000 for the first time ever, and then just kept climbing.
Axios Re:Cap digs into the reasons for Bitcoin's price surge, and what it means for its future as an actual currency, with investor and podcast host Anthony Pompliano.
A bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from 38 states and territories sued Google Thursday, accusing the company of a multi-pronged effort to maintain an illegal monopoly.
Why it matters: It's the third antitrust lawsuit against Google in as many months, setting up the company for legal battles on multiple fronts.
Make School, one of the earlier “coding bootcamps” to use income-sharing agreements, has quietly pivoted to traditional college loans that it covers until graduates find well-paid software development jobs. This is cheaper for students (and itself), the school tells Axios.
Why it matters: In recent years, income-sharing agreements (ISAs) have been hailed by some as the key to fix the college debt crisis because they seemingly hold schools responsible for their graduates’ professional—and financial—success.
When the pandemic turned Zoom into a much more prominent and frequent host of public-facing events and not just private video chats, it also confronted the company with knotty questions about moderating content similar to those faced by much larger companies, the company's policy chief told Axios.
Why it matters: The video conferencing firm doesn't expect the policy issues it's grappling with to evaporate once the pandemic ends and it's still set on long-term global expansion.
Facebook further escalated its long-brewing fight with Apple this week, launching a second round of full-page newspaper ads Thursday charging that new Apple privacy measures will hurt small businesses. At the same time, Facebook is backing developers in a lawsuit against Apple's app store policies.
The big picture: Apple wants to give users the chance to opt out of being tracked by Facebook and other companies that sell ads. Facebook says the move will "change the internet as we know it — for the worse."
Pornhub's removal of as many as 10 million videos Monday — a content-removal earthquake on a scale the web has rarely seen before — sent tremors through a tech industry built on user-generated content.
Driving the news: Following a New York Times expose of underage and nonconsensual content on Pornhub, Mastercard and Visa stopped providing service to the site.
Fiona Cicconi, the AstraZeneca executive who was named Google's new HR chief late on Tuesday, will face a daunting list of major problems when she starts work at the search giant in January.
Why it matters: Competition for talent remains fierce in the tech industry and critical to Google's ambitions.
State attorneys-general have opened two new fronts in the legal war on Google: A Texas-led lawsuit targeted the company's advertising business Wednesday, and another suit Thursday led by Colorado and Nebraska is expected to take aim at Google's search practices.
Why it matters: The antitrust complaints, following an October suit by the Justice Department, set up the internet's dominant search and advertising powerhouse for what's likely to be years of conflict in multiple courts.
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