A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the Republican National Committee accusing Alphabet's Google of deliberately redirecting the party's email messages to spam folders.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, rejected the RNC’s case for the second time, stating that the RNC could not refile the suit. Although Judge Calabretta expressed some understanding of the RNC's claims, he found that the party did not sufficiently demonstrate that Google had breached California’s unfair competition law.
The RNC's lawsuit alleged that Google had either intentionally or carelessly sent the party’s fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders, resulting in significant financial losses. Google, however, denied any misconduct.
In response to the ruling, Google stated that it was pleased with the court's decision, noting that it followed a bipartisan Federal Election Commission finding that the company’s email platform was not politically biased.
Judge Calabretta, appointed by Biden, acknowledged that if the RNC’s claims of political bias were accurate, they would be troubling and could have serious implications for political discourse. However, he ruled that the lawsuit did not satisfy the legal requirements under the cited laws.
Last year, Judge Calabretta had dismissed the RNC’s initial lawsuit but permitted the filing of an amended complaint. The RNC’s revised lawsuit included additional factual claims intended to show that Google acted in bad faith, but Judge Calabretta concluded that Google was not entitled to immunity under a federal law provision protecting internet companies from liability for user-posted content.
The judge also observed that the RNC’s emails were not routed to spam folders after the lawsuit was filed in late 2022. Google contended that the emails were marked as spam by individual users, which led to automatic labeling of similar emails.
The case is known as Republican National Committee v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, No. 2:22-cv-01904. Legal representation included Harmeet Dhillon and Thomas McCarthy for the RNC, and Abdul Kallon, Sunita Bali, and Michael Huston for Google.
