[ by Howard Haykin ] Larry Eiben, co-founder of Moxy Vote, LLC, has petitioned the Commission to adopt regulations to recognize a new category of investment advisor, namely, a "neutral Internet voting platform" pursuant to Rule 201.1 92(a).  The new IA category would all an investor to receive information about his or her investments, to vote shares at corporate meetings, and to designate as the recipient of proxy materials to be transmitted by companies whose stock is registered with the Commission. Mr. Eiben says that a regulatory change is warranted because current rules are needlessly preventing individual ("retail") investors from efficiently voting their shares via the Internet.  Current rules do not allow individual investors to aggregate and receive information in ways that they find most useful in deciding how to vote;  current rules also prevent them from being able to vote shares in a manner that is allowed to institutional investors.  The change being proposed will address a chronic problem in this area, namely, the low participation by retail investors in voting shares of their portfolio companies. Interest of petitioner and introduction. Mr. Eiben is a co-founder of Moxy Vote (www.moxyvote.com), which was designed as a web site that offers retail investors a way to intelligently and efficiently vote proxy ballots for public company  stocks  that  are  held  in  their  portfolios.  Conceptually,  the  idea  is  that shareholders can have the convenience of storing personal information about their portfolio online, as well as voting their shares from a single centralized online platform in the same manner as electronic platforms offered to institutional investors by such firms as Broadridge (via its "ProxyEdge" platform), Institutional Shareholder Services ("ISS") and Glass Lewis. As originally conceived, Moxy Vote's  business model was to allow a  user to enter personal information in an online account.  Moxy Vote would then provide access to electronic Voting Instruction Forms ("VIFs"), proxy statements and annual reports issued by portfolio companies.  It would allow users to express and store for easy reference their preferences about how they want their shares voted at upcoming meetings and then vote the shares.  To enhance investors' understanding of issues that will arise at upcoming company meetings, Moxy Vote's  plan was to allow the online posting of information about specific agenda items. The idea was not to create a "chat room" where anyone could post a comment, but to use Moxy Vote as a vehicle by which registrants and proponents of shareholder proposals could advise investors on these issues and help them cast an informed vote. During its start-up period, Moxy Vote worked closely (and, we think, successfully) with the Commission staff in an effort to assure that its operations would not run afoul of the Commission's solicitation regulations.  Those discussions inform the rulemaking proposal that we outline here. Ultimately,  however,  Moxy  Vote  concluded  that  it  would  be  unable  to  continue operations because the  type of  Internet service it  is  offering  does  not  fall  within  existing regulatory classifications.  Because Moxy Vote is aggregating and transmitting advice - but not generating advice through its own staff - it does not appear to qualify for recognition as a registered investment adviser.  Because it does not fit into the "registered investment adviser" pigeonhole, a number of brokers have advised that they will not deliver proxy materials to their clients at moxyvote.com, even though the operational burden to them is not believed to be significant. The refusal of brokers to disseminate information to shareholders at an online platform of their choosing is the first significant problem that needs to be addressed.   The second major hurdle is the fact that proxy distribution/collection agents are presently charging significant fees to internet voting platforms to collect votes - a fee that we believe should be paid by public companies and one that proves substantially more burdensome to  individual voters than institutional voters. Because of these difficulties, Moxy Vote was recently forced to suspend operations - concluding that it would not be able to generate the scale necessary to make the company viable as a long-term entity.  This occurred after extensive discussions not only with Commission staff, but also staff at FINRA and the New York Stock Exchange.  The view all around appeared to be that current rules do not allow for the type of operation that Moxy Vote proposed, even though the model is widely available to Internet users in other sectors of our; economy.  This is unfortunate, because Moxy Vote's brief history shows that there is a significant demand by users for such a service. For additional information, go to:  [Request for SEC Rulemaking, File No. 4-651, 8/17/12].