By Mike Scarcella
Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Republican National Committee on Friday lost its appeal that sought to reinstate a lawsuit accusing Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower judge’s dismissal of the discrimination lawsuit, which the RNC filed against Google in 2022. The three‑judge panel found that the RNC interacted with Google as a sender to recipients on Google’s platform, and that Google’s email filtering functions are services provided to its users.
Google and lawyers for the RNC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders for partisan reasons and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations.
The RNC said the diversion lasted for nine months from late 2021 to 2022 and applied to millions of its emails. It also said the routing stopped after the organization sued Google.
Google has denied that its systems divert email to spam based on political or other viewpoints. It said email is routed to spam filters based on internal algorithms that are trained by user action and other factors.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, dismissed the lawsuit last year. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated state or federal laws.
In the appeal, a lawyer for the RNC told the 9th Circuit that "this was not typical spam filter behavior" that the RNC was experiencing.
“It stopped immediately after we filed this lawsuit,” attorney Conor Woodfin said. “That shows that Google has control, that they know what's going on, they knew what they were doing, and that they had an off switch that they could have pressed at any time.”
A lawyer for Google, Michael Huston of law firm Perkins Coie, told the appeals court that the company had worked with the RNC to assess and help resolve its concerns.
Huston said Google and other platforms offer spam filters for the benefit of users. He had warned that a ruling allowing the RNC’s lawsuit to move ahead would open up a torrent of lawsuits alleging a company has wrongly classified its messages as spam.
The case is Republican National Committee v Google, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-5358.
For RNC: Conor Woodfin of Consovoy McCarthy
For Google: Michael Huston of Perkins Coie
Read more:
Google beefs up legal team to fight RNC bias lawsuit
Google defeats RNC lawsuit claiming email spam filters harmed Republican fundraising
Google hires law firm Perkins Coie to fight RNC's spam filter lawsuit
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella)
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