The FBI was right to censor Twitter’s transparency report due to national security concerns, a three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday, affirming a district court decision and rejecting the company’s First Amendment claims in docket 20-16174.

Though “cloaked in the garb" of protecting children’s privacy, California’s age-appropriate social media design law (AB-2273) “is in reality a broad and unconstitutional attempt to restrict speech and control the information that can be provided to minors.” So said CCIA’s amicus brief Friday (docket 5:22-cv-08861) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose in support of NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block the law from taking effect in July 2024 (see 2212140063).

Eight state attorneys general obtained judgments shutting down a robocall operation alleged to have made millions of illegal automated calls in 2019 and 2020. John Spiller and business partner Jakob Mears, owners of Texas-based Rising Eagle Capital Group and JSquared Telecom, are now banned from all telemarketing, showed stipulated orders for Mears and Spiller released Monday.

A defendant can't avoid liability "for a prominent deceptive representation on the front of a package with fine print on the back,” said plaintiff Dennis Gromov in a Friday memorandum in opposition to defendant Belkin’s motion to dismiss a false advertising case (docket 1:22-cv-6918) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago.

Carnival Corp. engaged in wiretapping when it allowed third-party vendors such as Microsoft to embed JavaScript session replay code on its website to record visitors’ electronic communications, alleged a class action Thursday (3:23-cv-404) in U.S. District Court for Southern California in San Diego.

Wireless ISP NMSurf, in its appeal of the district court’s upholding of Santa Fe’s 2% revenue-based franchise fee, didn’t identify any legal error by the district court that would warrant the appellate court to reverse it, argued the city in its response brief Friday (docket 22-2131) in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Social media companies are “ruthlessly extracting every dollar possible with callous disregard for the harm to mental health,” said a Friday class action (docket 2:23-cv-1233) filed by Irvington Public Schools in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Newark. It’s one of several similar cases linking social media platforms from Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google with rising rates of mental health issues among kids (see 2302170051).

The FCC’s apparent 2019 rejection of the proposed “do-or-die” deal for Intelsat and other C-Band Alliance members to privately auction $60 billion in spectrum, and the $246 million in Intelsat stock divested by top investors in “a rushed overnight fire sale” before the bad news got out, “would lead any reasonable person and juror to believe that there was insider trading.” So said lead plaintiff the Walleye Group in its opposition Thursday (docket 4:20-cv-02341) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in Oakland, to the Silver Lake defendants’ Jan. 19 motion to dismiss Walleye’s second amended complaint (see 2301190044).

Ericsson agreed to plead guilty and pay a criminal penalty of more than $206 million after breaching cooperation and disclosure provisions of a 2019 deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), said DOJ Thursday. Ericsson also will plead guilty to engaging in a “long-running scheme to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying bribes, falsifying books and records, and failing to implement reasonable internal accounting controls in multiple countries around the world,” DOJ said.

The plaintiffs in three of the dozen class actions stemming from T-Mobile’s Jan. 19 disclosure that bad actors gained access to the personally identifiable information of 37 million customer accounts all support a Feb. 8 motion to transfer the 12 cases to a single venue for pretrial consolidation under a single judge (see 2302200001) but disagree what the venue should be.