On Friday, TechFreedom filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to protect email spam filtering from frivolous lawsuits. The Republican National Committee sued Google, alleging that, by shunting GOP fundraising emails into Gmail spam folders, Google violated California’s 1872 common-carrier law. The district court dismissed the complaint. As TechFreedom’s brief explains, the RNC’s claim is bad law, bad history, and bad tech policy.
“The RNC wants to replace spam filters with spam lawsuits,” said Corbin K. Barthold, Director of Appellate Litigation at TechFreedom. “Make no mistake: The RNC is arguing that every spam-filtering decision can be made into a federal case. But the courts are not equipped to second-guess the dynamic, probabilistic filtering systems that email services rely on to protect users. A regime of spam filtering-by-lawsuit would be inefficient, inaccurate, and widely abused.”
“The RNC’s reliance on an 1872 law is preposterous,” Barthold continued. “The RNC’s claim—that a 19th-century common-carrier statute applies to 21st-century email services—rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the statute’s historical context and the technical realities of modern digital communication. The statute was drafted with letters and stagecoaches in mind. It is ill-suited to address the mechanics of a free and nearly instantaneous medium like email.”
“Gmail does not even ‘carry’ messages. It sorts them,” Barthold concluded. “Filtering spam is the heart of its service. That service will no longer work properly if any disgruntled third party can throw any spam-filtering decision into the courts. The Ninth Circuit should make clear that it wants nothing to do with email product design and inbox management.”
The case is Republican National Committee v. Google Inc., No. 24-5358 (9th Cir.).
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Find this brief on our website and share it on X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. See our related work:
- Spam Emails, Spam Lawsuit: The GOP Tries To Break Gmail By Court Order, Techdirt (Feb. 6, 2025)
- From Railroads to the Internet: Legal Limits on Common Carriage, TechFreedom & WLF Webinar (Aug. 29, 2024)
- Are Social Media Platforms Common Carriers? Only If You’re a Judicial Activist, Substack (Feb. 20, 2024)
- Amicus brief in Ohio v. Google on why search engine aren’t common carriers (Jan. 26, 2024)
- Amicus brief in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton (Dec. 7, 2023)
- FCC Revives Common Carriage for the Internet, Reason (Sep. 28, 2023)
- The Republican Project to Break Your Email Account, The Bulwark (Dec. 12, 2022)
- Social Media and Common Carriage: Lessons from the Litigation over Florida’s SB 7072, WLF Legal Backgrounder (Sep 23, 2021)
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