• by Wendy Davis , 7 hours ago

A federal appeals court on Friday refused to reinstate the Republican National Committee's claims that in 2022 Google wrongly sent fundraising messages into Gmail users' spam filters.

The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, came in a dispute dating to October 2022, when the political organization sued Google for allegedly disproportionately designating Republican fundraising messages as spam.

The complaint referred to a North Carolina State University study that found Gmail flags around 68% of Republican campaign emails as spam, compared to 8% Democratic campaign emails. (The organization says the “mass relegation” of its emails to Gmail spam folders stopped in October 2022, after it filed suit.)

Google denied filtering emails for political reasons, arguing that its anti-spam technology aims to make the product better for users, and doesn't designate mail as spam for partisan purposes.

“The same Gmail algorithm governs emails sent by the Democratic National Committee -- and everyone else,” Google argued in court papers.

The Republican National Committee's complaint included claims that Google violated California's common carrier law (which prohibits telecommunications companies from discriminating when transmitting messages), a state civil rights law that prohibits discrimination, an unfair competition law, and that the company wrongly interfered with potential economic relationships.

In 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta in the Eastern District of California dismissed the political group's discrimination claims, and claims relating to common carriage. The following year, Calabretta dismissed the remaining claims.

He said in the 2023 ruling that California's civil rights law doesn't cover discrimination based on political affiliation, and that email providers like Google aren't considered common carriers in California.

The Republican National Committee then appealed to the 9th Circuit.

Among other arguments, the organization contended that Google should be treated as a common carrier, comparable to a telephone company, and that California's civil rights law, the Unruh Act, should be interpreted as banning discrimination based on political affiliation.

Circuit Judges Margaret McKeown (a Clinton appointee), Michelle Friedland (an Obama appointee) and Jennifer Sung (a Biden appointee) rejected those arguments.

"As an initial matter, the relationship between an email sender and Google is an imperfect fit for the traditional carrier-passenger framework," the judges wrote in an unsigned opinion.

They added that even if Google was considered a "carrier," the Republican committee's allegations wouldn't support its claim.

"The relevant activity here is Google’s alleged email filtering -- a service that Google provides to its users," the judges wrote, elaborating that the Republican National Committee alleged that it was not a "Gmail user" and did not use Gmail to send messages.

The judges also rejected the political group's claim regarding California's civil rights law, writing that the organization lacked "standing" because it didn't allege that it "intended to sign up for Gmail services or that it encountered discriminatory terms," or that it was "a user or prospective user of Gmail."