The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments tomorrow in a case that could upend the internet

Google goes before the U.S. Supreme Court this week to defend what is widely regarded as a pillar of the online economy—and one that is also being blamed for a proliferation of harmful content. Section 230 gives internet platforms legal immunity for almost all third-party content hosted on their sites. Passed as part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, even AOL cofounder Steve Case, who pressed for the law's passage, thinks it's time to change it. The WSJ has more here. So does The Hill.

Mark Zuckerberg is stealing a page from his sometimes nemesis Elon Musk by launching a subscription service, called Meta Verified, that will allow users to add a coveted blue check mark to their Instagram and Facebook accounts for up to $15 a month. Twitter's similar initiative under own Musk's stewardship has produced mixed results to date. TechCrunch has more here.

Fundraising by venture firms hit a nine-year low in the fourth quarter, as the macroeconomic pressures that already weighed on technology startups began to affect the investors who underpin the industry. Venture firms raised $20.6 billion in new funds in the fourth quarter. That was a 65% drop from the year-earlier quarter and the lowest fourth-quarter amount since 2013, according to data firm Preqin. The WSJ has more here.

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Pliant, a 2.5-year-old, Berlin-based outfit B2B credit card platform that operates on the back of Visa, has raised $28 million in Series A funding, led by SBI Investment. More here.

Carbon Maps, a new Paris-based SaaS platform that aims to enable agri-food industry players to perform rapid assessments of the environmental impact of their products and agricultural raw materials, has raised €4 million in pre-seed funding from the European venture firms Breega and Samaipata. TechCrunch has more here.

Gateway.fm, a 17-month-old, Stavanger, Norway-based decentralized blockchain infrastructure node provider, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding led by Lemniscap. More here.

Jumba, a 14-month-old, Nairobi-based construction tech platform that aims to simply the purchasing and financing of construction materials, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, with participation from earlier backer Enza Capital (which led the startup's $1 million pre-seed round last year), Foundamental, Seedstars International Ventures, Logos Ventures, SpeedInvest, First Check Africa and Alumni Angel Network. TechCrunch has more here.

Quell, a 2.5-year-old London-based startup taking a gamified approach to the home fitness market, via resistance bands designed for a more active workout, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Tencent. Other backers in the round include Khosla Ventures, Heartcore Capital, Social Impact Capital and AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant. TechCrunch has more here.

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Elon Musk slammed the increasingly powerful AI outfit OpenAI over the weekend, saying it no longer resembles what he co-founded with numerous others -- its now-CEO Sam Altman -- in December 2015. “Now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” he posted to Twitter. “Not what I intended at all.” Fortune has more here.

Australia’s largest venture capital fund, Blackbird Ventures, has promoted Michael Tolo, Phoebe Harrop and Tom Humphrey to general partners, after all joined the fund two years ago. The outfit closed its fifth fund in November with $1 billion in capital commitments. Australia's Financial Review has more here.

How much is enough to be comfortable when you retire? The answer is somewhere between $3 million and $5 million, according to the 553 investors worldwide who shared their views in the latest MLIV Pulse survey. More in Bloomberg.

The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago. So did numerous other L.A. landmarks and institutions, notes the L.A. Times. 

"A U.S. manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court." The WSJ looks at why officials in the U.S. and the EU say China is now using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights.

InDrive, an international ride-hailing app, has raised $150 million using an unusual debt instrument that links repayment to the company’s performance. Bloomberg has more here.

Darktrace, the British cybersecurity company that’s been the target of short-seller reports, said it’s hired accounting firm EY to review “key financial processes.” Darktrace shares hit a record low after the report called into question the company’s accounting and drew comparisons with Autonomy, a software company created by Darktrace cofounder Mike Lynch. Bloomberg has more here.

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