On April 20, 2026, the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed amicus briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit asking the panel to reverse a district-court holding that would, in CCIA's reading, 'sweep far beyond' the dispute that produced it. The briefs — filed in support of Google, Apple, and Meta in the consolidated In re Apple/Google/Facebook Simulated Casino-Style Games Litigation — warn that allowing intermediary-liability immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to turn on whether the host is a non-profit or whether the service moves money for users would erase the predictable liability floor on which most of today's commercial web sits.
What the district court actually held
The underlying ruling, issued by Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California (Nos. 5:21-md-02985-EJD; 5:21-md-03001-EJD; 5:21-cv-02777-EJD), permitted unjust-enrichment and state-gambling claims to proceed against the three app-store operators on the theory that processing in-app payments for virtual chips in 'social casino' apps is not publishing activity protected by 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1). On Davila's reading, once a platform moves beyond hosting an app and starts taking a cut of the user's spend, it stops being a passive distributor of third-party content and becomes an active participant in the underlying conduct. The order was certified for interlocutory appeal, and Apple filed its petition for review in October 2025.
What the statute actually says
Section 230(c)(1) is short: 'No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.' The accompanying definition in § 230(f)(2) describes an 'interactive computer service' broadly enough to include 'systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions' — a clear signal that Congress did not wall the protection off from any particular business model. The statute draws no line between non-profit hosts and commercial ones, and none between platforms that monetize via subscriptions, ads, marketplaces, or transaction fees and those that do not. As CCIA president Matt Schruers put it in the association's announcement of the filings, the district court's reasoning 'artificially rewrites federal law; Congress did not limit these assurances to non-profit speakers alone.'
Why 'payment processing isn't publishing' sweeps so wide
The reason the brief presses the 'sweep' point is structural. Payments are the substrate of the modern internet. App stores process subscriptions for journalism and indie podcasts. Cloud platforms charge metered fees to host third-party software. Substack, Patreon, YouTube, Twitch, Kindle Direct, Etsy, and Steam all combine hosting with a financial pipeline; so do federated services and small co-operatives that take memberships. If 'processing payments tied to the same content' is, by itself, enough to strip an intermediary of Section 230 protection, the rule that emerges is not 'no immunity for social-casino apps.' It is 'no immunity for any paid distribution of user content.' The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in its own April 23, 2026 amicus filing supporting the appellants, made the point bluntly: 'Congress made no distinction — and the court shouldn't recognize one — between hosting third-party content and processing payments for the same third-party content.'
The steelman: the plaintiffs aren't imagining the harm
It would be glib to dismiss the underlying case as nuisance litigation. Social-casino apps are a documented pattern of consumer harm — operators design loss loops that read very much like real-money gambling, and several state statutes allow civil recovery of losses from 'illegal' wagers. The plaintiffs' core grievance — that platforms with deep visibility into transaction flows profit while users incur losses they cannot cash out — is serious. Section 230 was never meant to immunize the underlying conduct of the developers running these apps. Nothing in the statute prevents state regulators or private plaintiffs from pursuing the operators themselves, and nothing prevents Congress from amending the law if it concludes platforms should owe specific duties at the payments layer.
The Ninth Circuit already has a narrower off-ramp
What the panel should resist is rewriting Section 230 to do work the statute does not do. The court already has a more disciplined framework. In Calise v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-15910 (9th Cir. June 4, 2024), the same court held that Section 230 bars a claim only when (1) it would require the provider to monitor user content and (2) the duty to monitor springs from the provider's decision to host that content. That two-step duties analysis lets courts let through claims that genuinely sit outside the publishing function — like Meta's alleged breach of its own terms of service — without inventing a categorical carve-out for any service that charges money. A rule keyed to the actual duty at issue, rather than to the presence of a payment rail, is the proportionate way to police platform conduct.
The proportionate path
The pro-innovation position here is not 'platforms should never be liable for anything.' It is that the liability rules applying to internet intermediaries should be set by Congress in the open, not engineered case-by-case through judicial reinterpretation that turns Section 230 immunity on whether a service is for-profit or routes payments. CCIA's brief, filed on behalf of a membership whose constituent firms employ more than 1.6 million workers and invest over $100 billion a year in research and development, asks the Ninth Circuit to apply the statute Congress wrote. That is the correct ask. The open internet's predictable liability rules are the substrate on which an entire generation of small publishers, app developers, marketplaces, and federated-web operators built their work — and a payments-strip-immunity rule would land hardest not on the three named appellants, but on the long tail that cannot afford an army of lawyers to litigate every monetized post.