Report from MediaPost
In Brief – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), with a long track record of aggressive legal action against big online companies, is urging the Texas Supreme Court to reject Yelp’s attempt to block a lawsuit he filed in 2023 alleging that labels placed on crisis pregnancy centers listings by the review platform violated state consumer protection laws. In 2022, soon after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Yelp began adding notices that such centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.” Yelp, which later revised the notices, filed a complaint in federal court in California to block the lawsuit in Texas state court, but the federal lawsuit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. In Texas court, the state’s lawsuit was initially dismissed but was reinstated on appeal, with the appellate court finding that Yelp purposefully directed business activities toward Texas and was therefore subject to its consumer protection law. Yelp, backed by internet industry trade groups, appealed to the state Supreme Court arguing that Texas courts lack jurisdiction because the labels were created and published outside the state and applied nationwide rather than specifically targeting Texas businesses. Paxton contends Yelp actively conducts substantial business in Texas and so is subject to Texas law.
Context – Legal “jurisdiction” questions may seem like dry legalese, but the global nature of the internet means that changes in jurisdiction standards can have a tremendous impact on legal risk for businesses. One of the highest profile recent federal court decisions was the 2025 ruling of an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that reversed a prior dismissal in the class action lawsuit Briskin v Shopify and rejected the longstanding jurisdictional standard that Shopify, a Canadian company that operated a national online platform in the US that did not “differentially target” California, was not subject to California state privacy law. The case is back in federal district court and being litigated on the merits.