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.

The Biden administration never tried to influence social media content moderation, but the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have stopped meeting with tech companies due to the ongoing litigation, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a Senate panel Tuesday.

For more than 20 years, plaintiffs Best Payphones, Northeastern Telecom and Paramount Financial Recovery contended that the payphone service rates that defendant Verizon charged between 1997 and 2006 didn’t comply with FCC regulations, said Verizon and co-defendant MetTel in their memorandum of law Monday (docket 1:23-cv-04935) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan in support of their motion to dismiss the complaint. The claims lack merit and are time barred, it said.

Two more amicus briefs emerged Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Apple’s petition to set aside the 9th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court’s affirmation of the U.S. District Court for Northern California’s injunction barring Apple from enforcing its anti-steering rules against U.S. iOS app developers. The injunction arose from the App Store antitrust litigation against Epic Games (see 2310030002).

SolarWinds is “disappointed by the SEC’s unfounded charges related to a Russian cyberattack on an American company," and it's "deeply concerned this action will put our national security at risk,” emailed a spokesperson Tuesday. The SEC's 10-count lawsuit alleged SolarWinds and Timothy Brown, its chief information security officer, were guilty of Securities and Exchange Act violations.

Verizon is seeking a deadline extension to respond to the Oct. 17 motion of seven Belmar, New Jersey, residents to dismiss Verizon’s complaint to force Monmouth County, New Jersey, to approve the carrier’s application to install nine small wireless facilities in the public rights of way (see 2310180031). Verizon’s counsel, Edward Purcell of Price Meese, asked U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp for New Jersey in Trenton for the extension in a letter Monday (docket 3:23-cv-18091).

Biotechnology company 23andMe failed to state in a notice of a data breach whether it successfully contained or ended the cybersecurity threat, said a class action (docket 3:23-cv-05565) Friday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. The company, which maps individual genomes of customers to create reports on subjects’ ancestry and genetic health risks, also fails to state how the breach occurred, the complaint said.

Defendants Pathward National Association and Progress Software Corp. (PSC) “failed to adequately protect” or “to even encrypt” plaintiffs Michelle Cantrell and Tracy Alcott’s personally identifiable information (PII), alleged a negligence class action (docket 1:23-cv-12554) Friday in U.S. District Court for Massachusetts in Boston.

At various times from March 2021 to April, the defendants in a fraud lawsuit marketed, distributed and sold counterfeit Nintendo products on Amazon.com using Nintendo’s trademarks, without authorization, alleged co-plaintiffs Amazon and Nintendo in a complaint Friday (docket 2:23-cv-01641) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle. Defendants Does 1-10 are currently unknown to the plaintiffs, said the complaint.

The class-action allegations of 38 AirTag user plaintiffs are “a misplaced effort to hold Apple legally responsible for third parties’ intentional misuse of its AirTag product” to track the plaintiffs or their family members without their consent, said Apple’s memorandum of points and authorities Friday (docket 3:22-cv-07668) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco in support of its motion to dismiss the Oct. 6 first amended complaint.