Bloomberg: Sources: in May, Google abandoned “Isolated Region”, a major new cloud service for China and other “sensitive” markets, over geopolitical and pandemic concerns  —  - ‘Isolated Region’ said to be shelved over tensions, pandemic  — Cloud providers racing to isolate data for companies, nations

Mike Isaac / New York Times: An independent audit commissioned by Facebook harshly criticizes the company, arguing that some of its decisions were “significant setbacks for civil rights”  —  An independent audit faulted the social network for “vexing and heartbreaking decisions” that affect its users — and potentially the November elections.

Devi Lockwood / Rest of World: Some brands are outsourcing the writing of well-worded Instagram captions to a far-flung cadre of writers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere via Fiverr  —  On Fiverr, an emerging class of social media experts write Instagram captions for faraway businesses.

Taylor Soper / GeekWire: A group of best-selling authors is teaming up with Amazon in filing a lawsuit against Kiss Library, which they claim sold unauthorized ebooks of their work  —  A group of best-selling authors, including some who previously fought Amazon over digital book pricing, are now teaming …

Todd Spangler / Variety: Comcast plans to invest $2B in Peacock by 2021, expects it to generate $2.5B in revenue by 2024 with 30M-35M users, says users gravitate to its curated channels  —  In September 2019, Steve Burke, then NBCUniversal chief executive, called Matt Strauss, with a question: Would he take the wheel of the Peacock project?

Michael del Castillo / Forbes: Cryptocurrency market intelligence startup Chainalysis expands its Series B by $13M to $49M and adds former top Treasury official to advisory board  —  U.S. President Donald Trump´s former Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Sigal Mandelker …

Dan Primack / Axios: Instacart raises $100M in new funding from T. Rowe Price, on top of the $225M round co-led by DST Global and General Catalyst last month  —  Grocery delivery company Instacart has raised $100 million in new funding, on top of the $225 million it announced l ast month, the company tells Axios.

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Mozilla updates Common Voice, its open source transcribed voice collection, to 7226 hours in 54 languages, releases first data set for “Hey Firefox” wake word  —  Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups …

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Intel Capital to invest $253.5M in Jio Platforms for a 0.39% stake, giving the Indian firm a valuation of $65B  —  Intel said on Friday it will invest $253.5 million in Jio Platforms, joining a roster of high-profile investors including Facebook and Silver Lake that have backed India´s top telecom operator …

Wallace Witkowski / MarketWatch: Lemonade, an AI-driven insurance service, closes up 140% in its NYSE debut, reaching a $3.93B market cap, more than double its 2019 valuation from Softbank  —  Referenced Symbols  —  As the world is buffeted by digital and societal revolutions, Lemonade Inc. is hoping to leverage …