SACRAMENTO - The Republican National Committee's effort to bolster its lawsuit against Google, which it accused of diverting its emails to spam folders for political reasons, has failed.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta had already tossed the RNC's complaint once, leading it to file an amended complaint that was similarly rejected on July 31. A 27-page ruling says the RNC has not stated a claim under the state Unfair Competition Law or for intentional interference with economic relations.
"While the RNC may be correct that Google's alleged conduct (if proven) is 'unfair' in a colloquial sense, the RNC is unable to point to any legislative policy that is implicated by the alleged conduct," Calabretta wrote.
"Nor can it point to a sufficient harm to users of Gmail - which is the focus of the UCL - that would suggest Google's practices are unfair."
The RNC sued in 2022 over fundraising requests from its non-Gmail addresses to Gmail users at the ends of months. It claimed Google kept its Get-Out-The-Vote emails out of recipients' inboxes, even though they had signed up for them.
The RNC claimed millions of emails are sent to spam folders during pivotal points in election fundraising and community building. It filed suit weeks before November 2022's Election Day, calling "the timing of Google's most egregious filtering... particularly damning."
However, it failed to convince Calabretta that the suit should continue past Google's motion to dismiss, which said the RNC failed to participate in a pilot program that would have allowed its emails to avoid spam-filtering.
It also said it was immune from suit under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which bars lawsuit over restricting access to objectional communications in good faith.
When it amended its complaint, the RNC said once it filed suit, the email diversions ceased.
The amended complaint aimed to show Google was not acting in good faith. Google said users had been marking RNC emails as spam at a high rate during months, leading it to send them to spam at the ends of months.
The RNC said it sent four times as many emails in 2020 but did not experience mass spam diversion. Judge Calabretta this time said Google was not entitled to Section 230 immunity at this state because the RNC's new allegations regarding the timing of the end of mass spam diversion made it sufficiently plausible Google acted without good faith.
However, the UCL required the RNC to allege Google committed a separate, unlawful offense.
"While the RNC is correct that a UCL violation may support an intentional interference with economic relations claim, the UCL needs to have been violated for 'reasons other than that [defendant] interfered with a prospective economic advantage,'" the judge wrote.
"In other words, the RNC may not 'bootstrap' its claims on one another by asserting that the intentional interference violates the UCL, and then relying on that UCL violation to support its intentional interference claim."
And Gmail users were not harmed, Calabretta said, by having a small number of wanted emails end up in their spam folders.
"Google is not alleged to have diverted the emails to force users to pay large sums of money to get their emails back; the users could access those emails at any time," Calabretta wrote.
"Nor did Google realize any monetary benefit from diverting the RNC's emails."
Calabretta said Google's conduct could be construed as unfair in a colloquial sense, but not legal.
"But it is not the role of this Court to decide these significant policy issues that must be addressed by a legislative body in the first instance," he wrote. "As broad as it is, California's Unfair Competition Law does not cover the conduct alleged by the RNC."
This time, Calabretta is not allowing the RNC to amend its complaint, which could lead to an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.