FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said the new designations "will help secure our networks from threats posed by Chinese and Russian state-backed entities seeking to engage in espionage and otherwise harm America's interests."
Whatsapp was cofounded in 2009 by Jan Koum, a Ukrainian emigrant to the US. Koum was born in 1976 in Fastiv, the city where Russia began its invasion in February. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19.3 billion in 2014.
If data centre companies want to set up their own dark fibre networks, they will have to come to a similar revenue share arrangement under current laws, which companies say is not feasible for business-to-business networks.
The rule on country of origin had become a bone of contention during the India-China border tension in 2020. The department had fined Amazon India in 2020, in one of the first such instances of non-compliance of the rule.
Srinivasu founded BillDesk twenty years ago along with Ajay Kaushal and Karthik Ganapathy, his colleagues at Arthur Andersen. He led the company to become one of India’s one of the few profitable fintech companies in India.
The company is also creating its team from Cloudtail such as CEO Chandramouli Venkataraman, who joined in February from Cloudtail where he was the category leader.
The Chennai-based company, which plans to list on the exchanges on April 7, has set the price band for the initial public offering at Rs 130-Rs 137 per share.