August & September landscape: Developments in lawsuits against big tech, new complaints against chatbots, and California secures legal victories in federal and state courts.
The Tech Litigation Roundup gathers and briefly analyzes notable lawsuits and court decisions across a variety of tech-and-law issues. This month’s roundup covers updates in the following cases (use the links for each case to go to the relevant section):
- United States v. Google LLC – A district court ordered minimal remedies for Google’s violations of antitrust law related to its search engine and search advertising.
- European Commission v. Google LLC – The European Commission ordered Google to pay €2.95 billion and end self-preferencing practices in an antitrust case focused on Google’s adtech.
- United States v. Google LLC – A district court heard oral arguments on remedies for Google’s violations of antitrust law related to its adtech business.
- Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. – Parents sued OpenAI, alleging that its ChatGPT product caused their 16-year-old son’s suicide.
- Montoya v. Character Technologies, Inc. – Parents sued Character Technologies and Google, alleging that the Character.AI app caused their 13-year-old daughter’s suicide.
- P.J. v. Character Technologies, Inc. – A mother sued Character Technologies and Google, alleging that the Character.AI app caused her then 14-year-old daughter’s suicide attempt.
- E.S. v. Character Technologies, Inc. – Parents sued Character Technologies and Google, alleging that the Character.AI app sexually abused their 13-year-old daughter.
- NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta – The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision that California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act can go into effect while NetChoice’s constitutional challenge moves through the courts.
- Social Media Cases – A California state court admitted expert testimony concerning social media addiction in a case alleging that several social media companies designed their platforms to drive engagement from kids.
- C.H. v. Google, LLC – Google settled a class action lawsuit alleging that it collected children’s personal data via YouTube without parental consent and used it for targeted advertising.
- Baig v. Meta Platforms, Inc. – The former head of security at WhatsApp filed a whistleblower action alleging that Meta retaliated against him for his efforts to expose widespread cybersecurity failures on the messaging app.
- FTC v. Amazon, Inc. – Amazon paid $2.5 billion to settle FTC claims that it deceived consumers into joining its paid Prime membership program and then prevented them from cancelling.
Continue reading August & September’s Roundup on Tech Policy Press.