A three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans questioned the procedure of Consumers’ Research’s challenge of the FCC’s method for funding the Universal Service Fund under the nondelegation doctrine, during oral argument Monday. Judges also pressed the FCC on whether Congress should be tasked with setting specific funding limitations and how the FCC reviews the quarterly contribution factor calculations made by the Universal Service Administrative Co.

AT&T’s agreement to pay a $6.25 million civil penalty to settle SEC allegations it and three of its investor relations executives violated the commission’s fair disclosure regulation (Regulation FD) (see 2210170044) took more than a month of negotiation and preparation before the proposed final judgments could be presented to U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer for Southern New York for approval, according to documents filed Friday (docket 1:21-cv-01951). AT&T’s consent to its final judgment was signed Oct. 26 by Assistant General Counsel Joseph Tocco before a notary public.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) “expressly denies” it violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), it said in a notice of removal (docket 1:22-cv-06779) Friday in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. AWS intends to “defend this matter vigorously,” it said.

Parler’s entire argument behind its motion to transfer plaintiff Catherine Migliano’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint to the U.S. District Court for Nevada (see 2211180050) “hinges on the conclusory premise” that Migliano agreed to “a purported forum selection clause” in the terms of service on the Parler website, said Migliano’s response in opposition Friday (docket 0:22-cv-61805) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Fort Lauderdale.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to challenge a federal court decision tossing businesses’ challenge to the Maryland digital ad tax’s pass-through ban, the Chamber said Monday. At oral argument last week, U.S. District Court for Northern Maryland Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby signaled she would dismiss without prejudice due to a state court striking down the tax as unconstitutional. In the Friday opinion, Griggsby also denied as moot Maryland’s motion to dismiss and plaintiff U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s motion for summary judgment.

Far from generating anticompetitive harm, as Epic Games’ Nov. 17 second amended complaint alleges, Android and Google Play “bring enormous benefits to developers and users -- and they do so at zero cost to users and minimal cost to developers in the vast majority of cases,” said Google’s answer and countersuit Thursday (docket 3:21-md-02981). Epic’s suit “threatens to undermine, rather than enhance, the very competition that has brought these benefits,” it said.

The 27 plaintiff-appellees in Verizon’s 9th Circuit appeal of a district court’s denial of its motion to compel arbitration seek a 65-day extension to Feb. 24 to file their answering brief, said their unopposed motion Thursday (docket 22-16020). The plaintiff-appellees don’t deny that arbitration terms existed in their customer agreements when they signed up for Verizon service, but U.S. District Judge Edward Chen for Northern California in San Francisco agreed with them in a July 1 order that the arbitration provisions were unconscionable and unenforceable.

Websites sending users unsolicited recommendations and creating links to content on their own platforms aren’t protected under Section 230 of the Communications Act because the information they're offering wasn’t created by a third party, argued the petitioners in the initial brief filed Wednesday with the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Google.

Communications and tech industry members of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the High Tech Inventors Alliance and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation often find themselves the targets of “baseless suits” funded by third parties “in exchange for a share of the suit’s recovery,” said the groups in an amicus brief Wednesday at the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. They oppose the mandamus petition of Nimitz Technologies to vacate an order from Chief U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly for Delaware demanding that Nimitz produce by Dec. 8 a volume of documents showing how it’s financing its four patent infringement lawsuits against defendants Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Cnet and Imagine Learning.

Good cause exists for the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to grant Pasadena, Texas, a Level 1 deadline extension to Dec. 30 for filing the principal brief in its appeal to vacate a lower court’s Aug. 2 order granting summary judgment to Crown Castle, said the city’s 11th-hour motion Wednesday (docket 22-20454) about when the brief was due. Pasadena missed the deadline because its attention was focused on resolving the dispute with Crown Castle through a private mediator, said the city.