US approves Google's plan to allow political emails to bypass Gmail's spam filter

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The US Federal Election Commission on Thursday approved a plan by Google to allow campaign emails to bypass Gmail's spam filters. The FEC's advisory opinion, passed by a 4-1 vote, said the Gmail pilot program is permitted under the Federal Elections Campaigns Act and FEC regulations "and would not result in the realization of 'an in-kind contribution prohibited'.

The FEC said the Google-approved plan is "a pilot program to test new Gmail design features free of charge on a nonpartisan basis with authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and executive PACs. ". On July 1, Google asked the FEC for the green light to implement the pilot project after Republicans accused the company of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms.

Republicans could have avoided some of their Gmail spam problems by using the right email setup. In a May 2022 meeting between Senate Republicans and Google's chief legal officer, "the strongest rebuke would come" from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that no email from one of its addresses was not reaching inboxes," the Washington Post reported in late July. "The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor had failed to activate a 'authentication that prevents messages from being marked as spam, according to people briefed on the discussions.'

As Techdirt's Mike Masnick explained, "[I]t looks like Rubio's spam operation doesn't have a DKIM/DMARC authentication setup in place. I know that pains a lot of people. Hell, it's something we had to deal with at Techdirt after realizing that Google was spamming a lot of our emails, but rather than complaining about "bias" against us, we explored the details. and figured out how to fix our email configuration."

The Republicans cited a study to back up their claims of bias, but one of the study's authors said the Republicans misrepresented the results. The Democratic National Committee told the FEC that Gmail's plan will help Republicans expand the use of "abusive fundraising tactics."

Gmail users who submitted comments to the FEC overwhelmingly criticized Google's plan. The FEC received over 2,500 comments, which can be found on the dossier page.

The committee's three Republicans and Democrat Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum voted for the order approving Google's plan. The Hill wrote that "Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who voted against the order, said she had 'trouble getting around the fact that it's a unique perk offered to political committees, and only to political committees "."

Lindenbaum reportedly said, "I don't want to [argue this], and it's for the same reasons all the commentators don't, but I think the law, the commissioner's regulations, and the precedent of the committee allow it." Democrat Shana Broussard abstained in the vote.

"We appreciate the FEC's prompt review of our application and will consider the positive and negative comments received during the public comment period," Google said in a statement provided to Ars. “Our goal during this pilot program is to evaluate other ways to address bulk sender concerns, while giving users...