The harm caused by imposition of state taxation on the federal Lifeline program “would be enormous,” said former FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Mignon Clyburn in an amicus brief Monday (docket 101873-8) in Washington Supreme Court in support of appellant Assurance Wireless. Assurance petitioned for review of a lower court ruling rejecting its argument that the carrier’s Lifeline services didn’t involve a retail sale.

Congress entrusts the FCC, not the courts, with the authority to decide whether to preempt local ordinances under Section 253 of the Telecommunications Act after notice and the opportunity for comment, said Pasadena, Texas, in a 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court petition Monday (docket 22-20454). The city is seeking en banc reconsideration of the panel’s Aug. 4 decision affirming the district court’s ruling in appellee Crown Castle’s favor (see 2308170035).

Here are Communications Litigation Today's top stories from last week, in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, D-N.Y., deprived political rival Gregg Marcel Dixon of his First Amendment rights by blocking and muting him from his social media accounts on Twitter, said Dixon’s complaint (docket 9:23-cv-04500) filed pro se Thursday in U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Beaufort. Dixon's website refers to him as a candidate for the 6th Congressional District of South Carolina, a post Clyburn has held since 1993.

A big question about subject-matter jurisdiction will require more briefs in a case on whether cities are entitled to franchise fees from streaming TV providers, said 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook. At oral argument Tuesday in City of East St. Louis v. Netflix (case 22-2905), judges also voiced skepticism about the merits of the Illinois city’s arguments.

Lawyers for DOJ and 48 states, in opening statements Tuesday in the government's antitrust bench trial against Google in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, argued that the tech company exercised monopoly power through ad sales tools and through deals requiring its search engine to be the default on Android phones and in some browsers. “Monopoly maintenance starts with defaults,” said Kenneth Dintzer, DOJ senior trial counsel.

DOJ attorneys convinced a three-judge 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court panel, all Republicans, that U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 injunction was overbroad and vague when it barred dozens of Biden administration officials from pressuring social media platforms to moderate unfavorable content. But the panel’s opinion late Friday (docket 23-30445), paring down the injunction and vacating it outright against officials from three federal agencies, left intact the restrictions on the White House, the Office of the Surgeon General, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hours after the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, sued to block enforcement of AB-587, California’s new social media law, the bill's author, Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D), defended the statute as “a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content,” Gabriel tweeted in a statement Friday.

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.

Rochester, New York, denies the allegations of Crown Castle, Extenet and Verizon that the new telecommunications code the city enacted three years ago imposes excessively high fees on telecom providers in violation of federal law (see 2308010002), said the city’s post-trial memorandum of law Friday (docket 6:19-cv-06583) in U.S. District Court for Western New York in Rochester. Its opposition to the companies’ motion for judgment in their favor followed a two-day consolidated bench trial in early June (see 2212200065).