Court case

On the surface, the AT&T-Time Warner deal bears a strong resemblance to Comcast's 2011 acquisition of NBC Universal. Both AT&T and its opponents have already invoked the Comcast-NBC Universal merger in support of their case. In its response to the Department of Justice's lawsuit, AT&T argued that the government’s 2011 decision to approve the Comcast deal, with conditions, set a precedent that should be respected.

When Donald J. Trump was running for president, he promised to “open up our libel laws.” No one quite knew what he meant. Recently President Trump started to make good on his campaign pledge. But he did so inadvertently — as a libel defendant on the losing side of a decision that will help victims of sexual misconduct sue when they are called liars. These days, a remarkable number of libel suits, including ones against Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Roy S.

Now that Congress has made clear that a US search warrant covers emails stored overseas, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to moot a case involving a data demand issued to Microsoft for a drug-trafficking suspect’s emails held in Ireland. The case, argued in February 2018, centered on whether a US tech firm must comply with a court order to produce emails even if they are stored abroad — in this instance, in a Dublin server. On March 23, Congress passed, and President Trump signed, the Cloud Act.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Democracy 21 filed a criminal complaint alleging that the Trump campaign and a super PAC controlled by President Trump's new national security adviser John Bolton worked with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to violate a law preventing foreign nations from participating in US elections. The groups allege that the John Bolton Super PAC, the Trump campaign and its former chairman Stephen Bannon were aware of Cambridge Analytica's nefarious activities.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, facing increasing political pressure from Republicans in Congress and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said that his office would investigate the surveillance of a former Trump campaign official. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, said he would examine whether law enforcement officials complied with the law and departmental policies in seeking permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap the former campaign adviser, Carter Page.

The head of Turner Broadcasting pushed back against one of the central arguments of the government’s case to block the AT&T and Time Warner merger, saying that his company’s channels would not be used as a weapon against rivals if the deal went through. The Justice Department has argued that Turner, which is owned by Time Warner, owns “must-have” channels like CNN and TNT that the merged company would use as leverage in negotiations with other cable and satellite TV operators.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit will be hearing the appeals of the Federal Communications Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom order. That court has principal jurisdiction over FCC decisions. The court heard the two previous appeals -- of the 2011 Open Internet Order, which it overturned, and the 2015 Open Internet Order, which it upheld. The Judicial Conference lottery, which is held when appeals are filed in multiple venues, had chosen the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but there had been a motion, unopposed, to instead consolidate the cases in the DC Circuit.

Can a US technology company refuse to honor a court-ordered US search warrant seeking information that is stored at a facility outside the United States? Oral arguments in a pending case took place at the Supreme Court in February 2018, and they did not go well for Microsoft, the tech giant that is challenging a warrant for information stored at its facility in Ireland.

On March 27, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle, finding that Google may owe billions in damages. Nearly 7.5 years after the original lawsuit was filed, the case will now be sent back down to federal court in San Francisco to figure out how much Google should pay. "Google’s use of the Java API packages was not fair," the court ruled. In October 2016 when the case was appealed, after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems and acquired the rights to Java, it sued Google in 2010. Oracle claimed that Google had infringed copyrights and patents related to Java.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which has fought to preserve open internet access for more than two decades, filed its petition to intervene in the net neutrality case before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. CCIA has standing to directly intervene in this action because many of members will be affected by the FCC’s latest order that would abdicate its role in enforcing nondiscrimination rules on the internet.