The federal government can encourage and even coerce social media platforms into moderating content without violating the First Amendment when there’s compelling public interest, conservative and liberal Supreme Court justices agreed Monday.

Communications Litigation Today is tracking the below lawsuits involving appeals of FCC actions. Cases marked with an * were terminated since the last update. Cases in bold are new since the last update.

Calling Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending (CDL) an “industrial infringement program,” four publishers said in a Friday appellee brief (docket 23-1260) in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court that IA “obtains physical copies of millions of in-copyright books, scans them without authorization in offshore scanning centers, and distributes the resulting ebooks online, where they can be read in full by anyone in the world without any payment to the copyright owner.”

Despite a lower court’s ruling that NetChoice was likely to succeed on its First Amendment challenge to California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, AB-2273, the plaintiff’s arguments are “unpersuasive” and a “misreading of the Act,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s (D) reply brief Thursday (docket 23-2969) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bonta's appeal seeks to reverse the preliminary injunction that bars him from enforcing AB-2273 (see 2402080003).

Roswell, Georgia, hasn’t demonstrated good cause for replacing Ronald Graiff with Ben Levitan as its RF engineering expert witness after Graiff quit that role March 2 over mental stress (see 2403110001), said T-Mobile’s opposition to the substitution Friday (docket 1:10-cv-01464) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta.

An Apple customer sued the company to retrieve 20 years’ worth of private and personal data after losing all access to his AppleID due to “a series of unfortunate events,” according to the customer's complaint Friday (docket 24-cv-433194) in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss for the District of Columbia granted Meta’s consent motion for a stay, through the close of business March 22, the deadline for Meta to respond to the FTC’s May 3 order to show cause why the commission shouldn’t modify its 2020 privacy consent order and enter the new restrictions on Meta’s business activities, said the judge’s signed order (docket 1:23-cv-03562).

Two Cyprus-based entities, Restoro and Reimage, operating as a “common enterprise,” agreed to pay the FTC $26 million to resolve allegations they ran a phony computer tech support scheme since January 2018 that bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, in violation of the FTC Act and the commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, said their proposed stipulated order Thursday (docket 1:24-cv-00735) in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Insurance firm Keenan & Associates discovered a data breach in its computer systems on Aug. 27, but waited six months before it notified and warned customers that their personally identifiable information (PII) was vulnerable, alleged a negligence class action Thursday (docket 8:24-cv-00544) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Santa Ana.

The district court correctly concluded that when purchasing toll-free calls from third parties that were destined for AT&T’s customers, Core Communications didn’t provide its tariffed switched access services to AT&T and therefore couldn’t collect from AT&T its tariffed rates for that service, said AT&T’s appellee brief Thursday (docket 23-3022) at the 3rd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court. Core’s appeal seeks to reverse the district court’s Oct. 13 summary judgment decision in AT&T’s favor (see 2310160018).