Two legal fights over attempts to charge streaming services local video franchise fees are heading from federal courts to state jurisdictions. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Beatty in East St. Louis, Illinois, sided Thursday with Shiloh, Illinois, in its request that its franchise fee suit be remanded to the state Circuit Court in St. Clair County, Illinois. Beatty said in his docket 3:21-CV-807 order that numerous federal courts facing similar streaming franchise fee suits have favored remand to state courts since the litigation involves state taxation regimes. Being sued are DirecTV, Dish Network, Disney, Hulu and Netflix, which had opposed Shiloh's motion. The same defendants dropped their appeal of a U.S. District Court decision to remand a video franchise fees fight to Georgia state court. In a docket 21-13111 order Thursday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the appellants' motion to dismiss.

States have sufficiently argued Google is violating antitrust law through its online advertising agreement with Facebook, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) argued Tuesday in docket 1:21-md-03010 before the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Google asked the court to toss out the multistate lawsuit in January, arguing the state’s lawsuit is “untimely” and fails to “plausibly” allege the agreement with Facebook violates antitrust law. Paxton noted the European Commission and the Competition and Markets Authority launched probes into the Jedi Blue agreement between the two companies, “solidifying the effort to end Google’s monopolization of the internet.” Google “demonstrably diminished publishers’ ability to monetize content, increased advertisers’ costs, and directly harmed consumers,” Paxton said.

States can’t bring antitrust claims against Facebook’s years-old acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook argued Monday in a lawsuit from 48 state attorneys general (see 2201140061). The company cited a district court ruling that federal antitrust law’s four-year statute of limitations provides a “generous” guideline for laches in its filing against lead plaintiff New York before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in docket 21-7078. The company argued Instagram and WhatsApp wouldn’t have achieved their growth without Facebook’s promotion and investment. “Subjecting Facebook to an equitable remedy now for these long-ago applications of the policies would be presumptively prejudicial,” it argued, seeking affirmation of the district court decision.

Samsung dupes the public by using the “game optimizing service” apps on its Galaxy smartphones, billed as preventing device overheating and extending battery life during long periods of gameplay, for “benchmark cheating,” alleged a fraud complaint Friday in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, that seeks class-action status. Samsung has programmed its devices to “run at faster than normal speeds” when they detect performance-measuring apps “used by reviewers and consumers to test and compare the speed and performance of smartphones and tablets,” it said. “Samsung knew that publications and review sites regularly use benchmarking apps to review and evaluate new devices and to compare those devices to competing or predecessor devices,” said the complaint. Samsung also knew if it “artificially boosted the performance of its devices when running benchmarking apps, reviewers and the public would falsely believe that the Devices were similarly as fast in real-world situations,” it said. Samsung “intentionally cheated on benchmarking apps to create a false perception regarding the speed and performance of the Devices, to thereby increase the demand for its new devices, and to support a high price-point for these devices -- all to the detriment of the buying public,” it said. The suit charges Samsung with unjust enrichment and violations of consumer protection laws. Samsung didn’t comment Monday.

Texas’ social media law doesn’t violate the First Amendment, Florida and 10 other states said Wednesday in an amicus brief filed with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in docket 21-51178 (see 2203030063). When a social media platform creates a forum for billions of speakers, the First Amendment doesn’t prohibit laws that “regulate the manner in which the platform hosts those messages,” the states said. Regulation becomes problematic only when it “curtails” the host’s “own message.” Texas’ law doesn’t do that, they said: “It permits social media platforms to say whatever they like; they simply must not stifle the speech of others in darkness.” The First Amendment doesn’t prohibit such a neutral disclosure regime, they argued. NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association sued to block the law, claiming First Amendments violations. The associations are suing against a similar law in Florida (see 2111150066). Joining Florida in the filing in support of Texas are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana and South Carolina.

The Delaware Supreme Court vacated a state Chancery Court injunction blocking Cox Communications from partnering with a mobile virtual network operator other than T-Mobile before it signs an MVNO agreement with T-Mobile. The Chancery Court ruled in August that Cox had violated an agreement that it would exclusively provide mobile service in partnership with T-Mobile, by planning to launch a mobile service last fall via a Verizon MVNO. In an en banc decision Thursday penned by Justice Gary Traynor, the appellate court said it agreed with Cox that the agreement with T-Mobile predecessor Sprint required the two companies to negotiate in good faith, but the language is clear they aren't required to come to terms. It said the Chancery Court's interpretation would give Cox only a T-Mobile option for an MVNO, and "reasonable actors in the position of Cox and Sprint would not have intended this result at the time of contracting." The court remanded the case to the Chancery Court for a determination whether Cox and T-Mobile have met their good-faith negotiation obligations. Justices Karen Valihura and Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, concurring in part and dissenting in part, said the agreement language was ambiguous and said a better course of action would be to reverse the trial court’s conclusion that the language was clear and remand the case so the lower court could make fact findings on what the extrinsic evidence shows about the parties' intention with that language. Cox didn't comment.

Communications Decency Act Section 230 doesn’t allow platforms to engage in “arbitrary discrimination” like banning users for political speech, attorneys for ex-President Donald Trump argued Tuesday in a lawsuit against YouTube in U.S. District Court in Oakland in docket 4:21-cv8009. Trump sued Facebook, Google, Twitter and their CEOs in July, claiming his suspensions after the Jan. 6 insurrection amount to illegal censorship (see 2107070065). Congress intended for Section 230 to benefit all Americans, and a First Amendment principle is that “all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen,” Trump’s team filed in response to DOJ’s brief on the constitutionality of Section 230. Trump argued the social media platforms violated the First Amendment. Platforms like YouTube act as common carriers when they “solicit and host third-party content,” they argued: That means any applications of Section 230 that “protect acts of arbitrary discrimination by Defendants would be unconstitutional.”

The U.S. District Court in San Francisco should grant the motion from Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) to dismiss a gender discrimination complaint from a former employee because she fails “to allege sufficient facts to support her asserted claims,” SIE lawyers argued Tuesday in docket 3:21-cv-09054. Emma Majo, who worked for SIE in San Mateo, California, for six years through 2021, filed her complaint in November seeking class-action status, alleging SIE employees who are female or identify as female “were not compensated equally to male employees who had substantially similar job classifications.” She also alleged SIE’s “discriminatory policies, practices, and procedures include a system where women are denied opportunities for advancement,” and that she was terminated abruptly after confronting management with her grievances. SIE countered that while Majo alleges “classwide claims of disparate treatment and disparate impact discrimination,” she fails to identify a “single policy, practice or procedure at SIE that allegedly formed the basis of any widespread intentional discrimination or had a discriminatory impact on women.” Majo’s widespread claims of harassment “are based solely on unactionable allegations of run-of-the-mill personnel activity,” said SIE. She claims “SIE failed to prevent discrimination and harassment, but provides no facts suggesting SIE knew or should have known about the alleged conduct about which she complains.”

Google has an advertising technology stranglehold over publishers, the European Publishers Council (EPC) said in an antitrust complaint filed Friday with the European Commission. Since it acquired DoubleClick in 2008, Google "has embarked on a barrage of unlawful tactics to foreclose competition in ad tech" and has now achieved "end-to-end control of the ad tech value chain," with market share as high as 90%-100% in segments of the chain. Google's ad tech suite is "rife with conflicts of interest" since it represents the buyer and seller in the same transaction while also running the auction house in the middle and selling its own inventory, EPC said. Google's monopolistic conduct "actively depressed publisher revenue" by, for example, preventing publishers from pitting their ad exchange partners against each other to encourage price competition. Lower advertising revenue means press publishers have fewer resources to invest in news content, EPC said. Google said it hasn't seen the complaint in detail but has been working with the EC and industry for many months. Online advertising "has enabled millions of small businesses to afford advertising for the first time, and for news publishers big and small, it's created new opportunities and substantial new revenue streams that did not exist in the print age," a Google spokesperson emailed. On average, news publishers keep over 95% of the digital advertising revenue they generate when they use Google Ad Manager to show ads on their websites, she added.

Dolby’s memorandum of law in opposition to LG’s motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction was due Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but it may take at least a week for the public to see even a redacted version of the filing. A joint stipulation and order signed Jan. 26 by U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty instructs Dolby to propose redaction of sensitive business information for the public filing, giving LG until the close of business Feb. 7 to propose additional redactions, before both sides meet and confer on the release of the public version. The process repeats itself after LG files a reply memorandum on Feb. 14, said Crotty’s order. LG alleges Dolby violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and California unfair competition laws by reneging on its commitments to ATSC to license its AC-4 audio codec patents for NextGenTV on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms (see 2201060058). All unredacted documents in the case are being filed under seal, and the few clues to emerge from the heavily redacted public filings so far suggest LG is trying to enjoin Dolby from suspending or canceling its license to unspecified Dolby technologies over the FRAND allegations.