Google Wins The Spam Filtering Battle Against RNC

The Republican National Committee (RNC) faced a bitter defeat when a California federal judge quashed its lawsuit that alleged Google of discriminatory" spam filtering.

The RNC had accused Google of sending their donation emails to users' spam folders, which ultimately led to reduced donations, and sought compensation for the same.

However, the court dismissed the plea on grounds of a lack of sufficient factual evidence to support the claim,

Case Background

RNC is the national committee of the Republican Party, managing the party's political operations. As a part of its fundraising efforts, RNC sends out e-mails for donation at month-end to people who have subscribed.

In December 2021, the RNC noted a drop in its email inboxing rate" - the rate at which emails are delivered to the recipient's inbox.

After bringing the issue to light and a couple of meetings, Google pointed out three possible causes for the same:

• High frequency of e-mails from RNC press release
• A fault in RNC's domain authentication
• Google's spam filtering algorithm based on user spam reports

However, the RNC said that only 0.3% of their total e-mail volume comprised press releases and also confirmed that their authenticator was functioning well.

Google also furnished some Best email practices" for the RNC to follow, despite which the inboxing rates didn't improve. This led the RNC to conclude that Google intentionally sent its e-mail to the user's spam folder.

Judgment and Rationale

The federal judge pointed out the immunity granted to Google under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows an interactive computer service" to voluntarily block or filter material it considered obscene, lewd, filthy, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.

Gmail's spam filtering policies apply equally to emails from all senders, whether they are politically affiliated or not.Google

The judge also pointed to the Zango vs. Kaspersky case, which granted unfettered discretion" to a provider to decide which material qualified as objectionable".

This essentially provides Google with the freedom to decide which content is objectionable and should be directed to spam folders. Moreover, the RNC's emails can be considered objectionable under the legal purview of the CAN-SPAM Act.

The RNC relied on a study that found that Gmail labeled only 8.2% of Democratic emails as spam as compared to 67.6% from Republican candidates.

The court also dismissed a North Carolina State University study that found Gmail marking more Republican emails as spam than their Democratic counterparts.

These spam segregations are based on user inputs and spam reports, and there's no inherent bias in the spam algorithm.

The RNC also pointed out that their emails should not be considered spam as they were only sent to people who had requested to receive these emails. However, the court said that merely because a user has interacted with a provider at some point doesn't automatically solicit" every email received by them.

Finally, the courts dismissed the plea on the ground that the RNC had not sufficiently pled that Google didn't act in good faith" while filtering spam emails.

RNC's complaint does not rise above the level of speculation, and there was no factual evidence for the court to draw the reasonable inference that Google filtered emails with intentions as claimed.

Meanwhile, Google has welcomed the court's decision and promises to keep investing in robust spam filtering to save users from unwanted messages.

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