Pay no mind to an FCC brief observing possible justifications for a challenged California LifeLine rule, the National Lifeline Association said Friday at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The California Public Utilities Commission agreed with the FCC office of general counsel’s August analysis in case 21-15969. FCC precedent supports finding the California rule isn’t preempted, the CPUC said.

Cross-petitioning the Supreme Court with two petitions for certiorari on different issues from Florida’s social media law S.B. 7072, as CCIA and NetChoice did, is the only way to bring compelled disclosure provisions that weren’t ruled unconstitutional by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in front of the justices, said academics and lawyers in interviews.

Though Kelli Ward chairs the Arizona GOP, and whose emergency application is before the Supreme Court to quash the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s subpoena for her T-Mobile call and text records, “the decision that will be reached by this Court will have significant impact on many nonprofit organizations throughout the nation,” said five conservative nonprofits in a proposed amicus brief Friday (docket 22A350) in support of Ward’s application.

A growing wave of Video Privacy Protection Act suits in U.S. district courts targeting streaming video provision isn't expected to crest anytime soon, data security and privacy lawyers tell us. While there have been other bursts of VPPA litigation in the past, Susan Israel of Loeb said the latest crop is focused largely on use of Meta Pixel for analytics and ad targeting -- Pixel being a piece of JavaScript code that allows for tracking visitor activity on a website.

Victims suing Reddit for allegedly profiting from child porn failed to plead that the website “knowingly benefited” from facilitating sex trafficking, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled this week, citing Reddit’s immunity under Communications Decency Act Section 230.

U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell for Rhode Island granted summary judgment Wednesday (docket 1:21-cv-00240) for the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) against the allegations of pro se plaintiff Christopher Laccinole that the union violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Rhode Island Right to Privacy Act. Rhode Island court dockets list Laccinole as the plaintiff in many dozens of TCPA complaints dating to 2014.

Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward argued in her emergency application Wednesday at the Supreme Court for a stay of the House Jan. 6 subpoena for her T-Mobile phone and text records that there was a “reasonable probability that four justices will consider the issue sufficiently meritorious to grant certiorari.” Justice Elena Kagan responded hours later with an order (docket 22A350) temporarily enjoining T-Mobile from releasing the records and ordered the committee to respond to Ward’s application by 5 p.m. Friday.

T-Mobile, its former Senior Vice President-Sales James Kirby and its ex-Vice President-Sales Jason Grutzius engaged in a scheme of artificially inflating sales to small- and medium-business customers, alleged former Director-Sales Heidi Cramer in a sex discrimination lawsuit Tuesday that claims she was terminated when the plan went awry. T-Mobile assigned her “sole blame” for the wrongful actions of her male co-workers in the sales department, said the complaint (docket 2:22-cv-03800) in U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio in Columbus.

An apparent rift is developing in the dozen or more fraud class actions over Samsung’s summertime data breach, between plaintiffs who want the cases consolidated and transferred to the U.S. District Court for Northern California and those who want them centralized and moved to the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.

AT&T for more than a year has been trying to place a 150-foot-tall cell tower with accompanying communications electronics on a 40-by-40-foot fenced lease area on a five-acre parcel of land in Lane County in western Oregon to provide and improve local wireless services, but the county has violated the Telecommunications Act by denying approval of the proposed facility, alleged AT&T in a complaint Tuesday (docket 6:22-cv-01635) in U.S. District Court for Oregon in Eugene.