Cry me a River
The RNC's suit against Google is mostly tossed, and if the RNC wants to continue the suit, it will be very limited in what they might accomplish with it.
Last summer (2022) there was a surge of Republicans whinging about how many of their emails are being filtered into the Gmail spam folder. This led to the Republican National Committee (RNC) in October 2022 filing a lawsuit against Alphabet (the parent company to Google) alleging targeting and political bias in their spam filter that moved many (if not most) of their (RNC) emails to the recipients “Spam” folder.
Well, when you include skeevy things like the following1:
it is not hard to think that their efforts are akin to manipulative spam, and that indeed, a decent Bayesian spam filter will catch them.
Of course, the Republicans felt that this was unfair, I mean, if they need their aging base to be tricked into recurring payments donations, using skeevy spam techniques, then perhaps their messages deserve to be filtered into Spam.
Now that we are up to date, the delish is that yesterday, the court pretty much tossed the entire suit, of the 7 claims, 5 were summarily dismissed, and two of them may be amended. Attempts to prove that Google was a common carrier, and to get around the section 230 of DMCA were flushed.
Ars Technica has a great article on this here that is totally worth the read. Will the RNC amend? I would bet on it, but I suspect they will still fail, because frankly, much of what they send fits the definition of Spam.
This loss will certainly not chastise the practices, but it does feel good to read about it.
Coda
I found this on one of my techie haunts, Slashdot, and the comments are why I really need to stop visiting. People who insist that the world of Tech and their employees are uber liberal would be surprised by how many far right conservatives are in the field. That’s a topic for a different day though.
Why are they wasting money and lawyers on this when Dear Leader needs them?
So much winning still! Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of grifters.
I didn't know Slashdot was still around. I never participated, but read it regularly back in the day.