Washington – Ahead of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit hearing several cases involving online casino apps, the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed three similar friend of the court briefs in support of the defendant app stores. Current federal law – Section 230 – recognizes that digital services, including app stores, engage in content curation, but are not treated as publishers of third-party content. (The three cases are Custodero v. Apple, Wilkinson v. Facebook, and Andrews v. Google.)
CCIA’s briefs state that the plaintiffs in these cases want a significant exception to Section 230 that “would force digital services into an impossible choice between independently monitoring millions of digital apps, and attempting to determine their legality under the varying laws of fifty different states and thousands of local jurisdictions, or else giving up on providing most internet content.”
The Computer & Communications Industry Association has advocated for Section 230 since the law was written and included in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
The following can be attributed to CCIA Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Stephanie Joyce:
“Section 230 covers digital services’ decisions as to what apps they offer and how payments are processed as part of their app store functions. The court of appeals should reverse the decision to deny Section 230 immunity to the app store defendants in these cases.”