Lawsuit over Trump Twitter Account Dismissed by Supreme Court

Note that this lawsuit has nothing to do with Twitter banning Trump. It's about whether Trump violated people's 1A rights by blocking them on Twitter. Justice Thomas had the case thrown out as moot because Trump is no longer president. Perhaps the only interesting aspect of this news, which the article barely covers, is in Thomas' concurrence:

> "We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”

Better article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/us/politics/supreme-court...

Also a good write-up by Eugene Volokh here, with plenty of original source material: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/05/justice-thomas-suggests...

He summarizes as follows:

"As I read it, Justice Thomas is not arguing that platforms are already generally common carriers or government actors under existing legal principles; that argument is quite a stretch, and his analysis seems to me to largely reject that argument, except perhaps when the platforms are restricting speech in response to government threats.

Rather, he is anticipating what might be done through legislation, and whether new state laws that do treat platforms as common carriers (more or less) are going to be seen as blocked by the First Amendment or 47 U.S.C. § 230. (His analysis of the interests involved may also be relevant to whether such state laws violate the Dormant Commerce Clause.) That's an issue the Court will likely have to deal with in coming years."