Union Square Ventures endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Tuesday, the first time the firm has made an endorsement. “As investors in technology companies, we believe that technology and innovation create broad opportunity and improve lives,” the firm said in a blog post. “The benefits of technology and globalization have not been evenly distributed.” Clinton is the “clear choice,” Union Square Ventures said. Its current investments include CloudFlare and Twilio. Managing Partner Brad Burnham signed onto an earlier letter blasting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (see 1607140086).

The Republican and Democratic vice presidential candidates “undermine tech” with their recent criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, CTA President Gary Shapiro said in a blog post for The Hill Tuesday. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, the GOP vice presidential nominee, were scheduled to debate Tuesday night. Congressional “passage of TPP has the potential to provide significant benefits to the tech sector and the entire U.S. economy,” Shapiro said. “U.S. technology companies alone exported $10 billion in goods and services to TPP markets in 2014. The TPP will open or expand access to these key markets for the products, services and applications made by the companies CTA represents, and facilitate market access for the wide array of industries that rely on these technologies to conduct their own business.” Kaine and Pence “must return to their more welcoming attitude to free trade -- and correct the opinions of the presidential candidates they serve -- if the U.S. is to survive and thrive in this global economy,” Shapiro said. Both presidential nominees have criticized the TPP and congressional leaders said no consideration is likely during the lame duck session, despite the Obama administration lobbying for such a vote.

Level 3 is investigating the "root cause" of a voice network outage Tuesday that affected some customers in North America, a spokeswoman said. The company restored all services by 11:31 a.m. EST, she said. The outage affected T-Mobile customers, T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted.

The White House touted “$7.7 million in new grants to bring broadband to 6 unserved communities,” outlined in a fact sheet Tuesday pegged to a White House Rural Forum meeting scheduled for Wednesday. “USDA’s Community Connect program provides funding for broadband deployment into unserved areas,” the administration said. “Since 2009, USDA Rural Development broadband programs have helped bring high-speed Internet access to nearly 6 million rural residents and businesses.” President Barack Obama also wrote an opinion piece on the topic, which the Department of Agriculture posted. “Over the last eight years, my Administration has worked hand-in-hand with rural communities to build more opportunity,” Obama said, which included efforts in “deploying high speed internet and wireless.” The White House Rural Council released a memo titled “Rural Strategies that Work,” which said “geographic isolation” is a key challenge for many rural communities: “Remote rural towns often do not have access to vital resources, such as high speed broadband or educational institutions.” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack wrote a Medium blog post highlighting a focus on telehealth. The Rural Council includes Vilsack, who is its chairman.

NTIA extended the deadline for comment on factors influencing industry adoption of IPv6 to Oct. 17, from Oct. 3 (see 1608180029). It was “in response to requests for additional time,” said an agency notice in the Federal Register. The Department of Commerce intends to use the comments to “inform” its work to promote IPv6, including a planned IPv6 best practices forum set to be held during the Internet Governance Forum's December meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico. Stakeholders see NTIA’s request for comment on IPv6 as particularly opportune given U.S. entities’ progress over the past year in adopting the protocol and amid the inflection point in the transition to new technologies like 5G and the IoT (see 1608310069).

The FCC net neutrality order ban on paid prioritization is overly restrictive, preventing arrangements that could benefit consumers, said a TechFreedom paper by Policy Counsel Tom Struble. "No exceptions are made for paid prioritization, and other forms of differential traffic management -- e.g., unpaid or user-directed prioritization -- are subject to strict scrutiny from the FCC," said a news release Friday on the paper. “The FCC’s blanket ban on paid prioritization created a major obstacle to innovation, and the agency failed to provide any real proof of harm as justification,” said Struble. “It’s not too late for the Commission to fix this. Adopting the transparency requirement proposed by the Broadband Internet and Technical Advisory Group would help ensure that consumers are receiving the service they pay for while providing the FCC with the information it needs to address concerns on a case-by-case basis. This approach would protect consumers without needlessly hamstringing ISPs that wish to experiment with new approaches to network management.” Struble was to discuss the paper Saturday at a conference where Commissioner Mike O'Rielly on Friday bemoaned the lack of FCC cost-benefit analyses (see 1609300069).

UBS downgraded AT&T from buy to neutral based on wireless competition concerns and “expectations for lower earnings growth than we had originally expected,” UBS said in a Wednesday note to investors. UBS said it's reducing its earnings per share estimates by 3 percent to $2.84 in 2016 to reflect “increased competitive intensity in wireless and incremental costs” tied to the DirecTV Now roll out (see 1609210048). UBS said earnings are likely to take a hit due to “1) diminishing benefits from the shift to installment plans, 2) limited upside to savings from lower volumes, and 3) ramping competitive intensity.” On DirecTV Now, an over-the-top service, UBS said: “We expect the cost of deployment of this new bundle and Sunday Ticket accounting to pressure Entertainment profitability in the near-term.”

Siris Capital completed a $2 billion acquisition of Polycom, the teleconferencing company said in a news release Tuesday. Polycom announced the deal in July after terminating a $1.96 billion deal with Mitel (see 1607080027). Siris Capital Executive Partner Mary McDowell will succeed Peter Leav as Polycom CEO, the company said.

The National Science Foundation is giving $10 million “in new awards to develop and scale next-generation Internet applications and technologies through the US Ignite program, supporting access to the gigabit-enabled networks and services that bring data and analytics to decision-makers in real time,” the White House said Monday in a fact sheet on its Smart Cities initiative. Four new cities joined US Ignite’s Smart Gigabit Communities network: Albuquerque, New Mexico; Adelaide, Australia; Salisbury, North Carolina; and Washington, D.C. “Four additional companies are joining the Administration’s NSF-led Advanced Wireless Research Initiative, collectively committing over $8 million in in-kind contributions to help support the design, deployment, and operation of four city-scale advanced wireless testing platforms,” the White House added: Anritsu, Crown Castle, Ericsson and FiberTower. Some $4 million of NSF money also would go toward “new Cyber-Physical Systems awards focused on Smart & Connected Communities, which would “help establish the technological foundation for smart cities and the Internet of Things, which enables connection of physical devices at enormous scale to the digital world through sensors and other IT infrastructure,” the administration said. The White House also said NTIA “is releasing a new toolkit to help communities leverage private-sector resources and expertise to advance smart cities” and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology “and its collaborators are announcing a new international coalition dedicated to developing an Internet of Things-Enabled Smart City Framework, with an initial release planned for next summer.”

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's regulatory policy “seeks to reduce the current regulatory burden by a minimum of 10% or $200 billion annually,” two advisers said in a white paper the campaign released Monday before the first presidential debate. Peter Navarro, a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, and private equity investor Wilbur Ross wrote the paper and are listed as senior policy advisers to Trump. “Many new rules never are adequately quantified -- or quantified at all,” the paper said of current regulations, citing the “woefully understaffed” White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. They cite the planned moratorium on new regulations a Trump administration intends to impose and the list of regulations ready for scrapping that all federal agencies would be mandated to produce. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “has promised to continue Obama’s regulatory agenda,” the Trump campaign white paper said. It didn’t mention telecom policy specifically. The Clinton campaign slammed Trump’s economic policy ideas Monday, saying in a news release “economists and business leaders across the political spectrum agree that his economic plan would plunge our country back into recession.”