Court OKS FCC media change

Agency threw out outlet ownership restrictions as obsolete

WASHINGTON — In a trio of unanimous rulings Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld federal regulators’ decision to ease ownership limits on local media, sided with Facebook in a lawsuit over unwanted text notifications it sent and dismissed Florida’s water lawsuit against Georgia, ending the long-running legal fight between the two states.

The court said the Federal Communications Commission acted reasonably in 2017 when it modified rules that predated the internet.

The old rules prohibited a single entity from owning a radio or TV station and a daily newspaper in the same media market. They also limited how many radio and TV stations one company could own in a single market and restricted the number of TV stations a company could operate in one media market.

“The FCC considered the record evidence on competition, localism, viewpoint diversity, and minority and female ownership, and reasonably concluded that the three ownership rules no longer serve the public interest,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.

In the Facebook case, the court rejected a claim that the text messages violated the federal ban on robocalls.

The case was brought by a man who received text messages from Facebook notifying him that an attempt had been made to log in to his account from a new device or browser. The man, Noah Duguid, said he never had a Facebook account and never gave Facebook his phone number. When he was unable to stop the notifications, he filed a class action lawsuit.

The 1991 consumer law bars abusive telemarketing practices.

The law restricts calls made using an “automatic telephone dialing system,” a device that can “store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator” and then call that number.

The question for the court was whether the law covers equipment that can store and dial telephone numbers even if the equipment does not use a random or sequential number generator.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court that it does not.

In the lawsuit between the states, the court rejected Florida’s claim that Georgia uses too much of the water that flows from the Atlanta suburbs to the Gulf of Mexico. Florida said that its neighbor’s overconsumption is to blame for the decimation of Florida’s oyster industry.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court that Florida failed to prove its case, which had been before the court twice in the past three years.