Doe v. ICF Technology Inc. et al

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS
Q.R., a minor, by and through his natural
mother and next friend, JANE DOE,
Plaintiff,
v.
ICF TECHNOLOGY, INC., et al.,
Defendants.
Case No. 6:25-cv-01093-HLT-BGS
MEMORANDUM & ORDER
Plaintiff Jane Doe sues Defendants ICF Technology, Inc., Accretive Technology Group,
Inc., and 4355768 Canada Inc. (d/b/a Crakmedia Network) on behalf of her minor child Q.R.
Defendants operate a commercial website that contains pornographic content. Plaintiff alleges that
Defendants failed to comply with Kansas’s age-verification law and her minor child was thus able
to view pornography through its website. Plaintiff asserts multiple state-law theories of recovery.
Defendants move to dismiss Plaintiff’s complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction under
Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(2). Docs. 30, 32. Defendants argue they lack minimum contacts sufficient to
support the Court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over them. The Court agrees and grants
Defendants’ motions.
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I. 	BACKGROUND 1
Kansas 	law 	establishes 	certain 	age-verification 	standards 	for 	commercial 	entities
knowingly sharing or distributing through websites material harmful to minors. K.S.A. § 60-6,146.
Plaintiff claims Q.R. was able to surreptitiously gain access to pornography through Defendants’
websites because Defendants’ age-verification measures failed to comply with Kansas’s standards.
Defendants operate a set of pornographic webcamera websites. ICF and Accretive own and
operate jerkmatelive.com and streamate.com. Crakmedia owns and operates jerkmate.com.
Plaintiff describes jerkmate.com and jerkmatelive.com as part of a larger network of pornographic
websites that duplicate and rebrand content found on streamate.com. According to Plaintiff,
streamate.com is capable of being white labeled (rebranded) by other websites that use its content
and infrastructure but use their own branding for the content. One “white label” of streamate.com
is jerkmatelive.com. Crakmedia’s site – jerkmate.com – serves in turn as a “promotional website”
for jerkmatelive.com. Jerkmatelive.com serves as “the Member Zone” of jerkmate.com.
Defendants receive revenue from sales of subscriptions and through advertising. Individual
webcamera models provide the content for Defendants’ sites. The sites allow the models to set
specific geographic limits on their content. These limits are respected across Defendants’ sites.
Some of Defendants’ subscribers are Kansans but Q.R. is not one of them. And Defendants derive
some advertising revenue from traffic attributable to Kansans. But none of Defendants are Kansas
residents. Defendants ICF and Accretive are commercial entities headquartered in Seattle and
organized under the laws of Washington state. Crakmedia isn’t based in the United States at all. It
1 	The Court resolves Defendants’ Rule 12(b)(2) motion without an evidentiary hearing. It therefore assumes the
truth of Plaintiff’s well-pleaded allegations only to the extent Defendants haven’t controverted them with
evidence. If Plaintiff responds to Defendants’ controverting evidence with evidence to support her allegations,
then the Court accepts Plaintiff’s view of things as true for the purposes of the motion. The Court does not weigh
evidence or make factual findings. The statements in this section reflect Plaintiff’s well-pleaded allegations plus
allegations Plaintiff has supported with evidence and any unchallenged controverting statements backed up by
evidence that Defendants have made.
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is organized under Canadian law and is headquartered in Quebec City. Plaintiff does not allege that
either ICF or Accretive have any physical presence in Kansas but does allege that ICF and
Accretive generated some revenue through subscription sales and advertising from Kansas
residents.
For its part, Crakmedia is not and has not ever been registered to do business in Kansas.
Crakmedia also offers evidence that it does not maintain a registered agent or an office in this state
or in the United States, nor does it own, lease, or rent any real or personal property in Kansas.
Crakmedia also offers evidence that it does not adapt its content on jerkmate.com for Kansas users
and does not feature any state-specific promotions or pricing for Kansas users. And it doesn’t
provide downloadable content on jerkmate.com that is designed for visitors in any particular
region.
Defendants contract with Amazon CloudFront to cache and deliver their content through
content delivery network (CDN) servers. At least one such server is physically located in Kansas
City, Missouri, which borders Kansas. The CloudFront CDN forms part of the infrastructure of
Defendants’ websites. CloudFront (and CDNs generally) use a collection of geographically
dispersed servers (called “edge servers”) that store (or cache) content from Defendants’ sites and
deliver that content to geographically proximate users. One of the basic ideas behind a CDN is that
it reduces barriers to quick content delivery created by geographic distance. Content cached on an
edge server will travel a shorter geographic distance to the user requesting it.
II. 	LEGAL STANDARD
A motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(2) challenges personal jurisdiction. A plaintiff
overcomes this challenge by making a prima facie showing that the court has personal jurisdiction.
XMission, L.C. v. PureHealth Rsch., 105 F.4th 1300, 1307 (10th Cir. 2024). The burden to prove
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personal jurisdiction belongs to the plaintiff. Wenz v. Memery Crystal, 55 F.3d 1503, 1505 (10th
Cir. 1995). But the burden is “light” at the pleading stage. Id.
A court confronting such a motion accepts as true the plaintiff’s well-pleaded jurisdictional
allegations unless they have been controverted by the defendant through an affidavit or other
evidence. The plaintiff must then support the controverted allegations by competent proof. Id.
Because a court is not tasked with weighing evidence at this stage, the court resolves conflicting
affidavits or evidence in the plaintiff’s favor and will consider the plaintiff’s “prima facie showing
. . . sufficient notwithstanding the contrary presentation by the moving party.” Id. (internal
quotations and citation omitted).
III. 	ANALYSIS
There are multiple parts to a personal jurisdiction analysis. The part this case focuses on is
the limits to personal jurisdiction imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
Defendants argue that the Court lacks specific personal jurisdiction because they lack sufficient
contacts with Kansas to make them amenable to jurisdiction. Defendants admit that their websites
are accessible in Kansas, that they have sold subscriptions to Kansas residents, and that they
generated advertising revenue from Kansans. But Defendants nevertheless argue that they did not
intentionally direct any activity relevant to Plaintiff’s claims at the forum. Defendants contend, in
essence, that they merely operate websites that are universally accessible and any of the contacts
with the forum related to Plaintiff’s claims were fortuitous contacts owing to Q.R.’s unilateral
conduct.
Plaintiff argues Defendants have minimum contacts with forum because (1) Kansas
residents make purchases such as subscriptions through their websites, (2) Defendants’ sites’
geotargeting limits mean Defendants know whenever people in Kansas are accessing their sites
and selectively deliver content consistent with those limits, and (3) Defendants utilize Amazon’s
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CloudFront CDN, which has an edge server located within a few miles of the forum to facilitate
reliable delivery of content to a region that includes the forum.
The Court agrees with Defendants and grants the motion to dismiss.
A. 	Personal Jurisdiction, Due Process, and Minimum Contacts
The overarching standard for personal jurisdiction is well known. A plaintiff obtains
personal jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant in a diversity action by showing that jurisdiction
is legitimate under the laws of the forum state (here, Kansas) and that the exercise of jurisdiction
does not offend the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. PureHealth Rsch., 105 F.4th
at 1307. This two-prong showing essentially collapses in Kansas because Kansas authorizes its
courts to exercise jurisdiction over nonresident defendants to the fullest extent permitted by due
process. Progressive N.W. Ins. Co. v. New Horizons RV Corp., 2023 WL 7323321, at *2 (D. Kan.
2023).
Personal jurisdiction thus focuses on due process. And the touchstone for due process
remains “whether the defendant purposefully established minimum contacts in the forum State.”
PureHealth Rsch., 105 F.4th at 1307 (internal quotations and citation omitted). A plaintiff may
establish the requisite minimum contacts under one of two theories: “general jurisdiction” or
“specific jurisdiction.” The type of jurisdiction at-issue here is specific jurisdiction. This theory
focuses on “the relationship among the defendant, the forum, and the litigation.” Id. at 1308
(internal quotations and citation omitted). If the requisite minimum contacts exist, due process also
requires the court to determine that maintenance of the suit “does not offend traditional notions of
fair play and substantial justice.” Id. at 1307-08 (internal quotation and citation omitted).
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B. 	Defendants’ Kansas Contacts and Specific Personal Jurisdiction’s Purposeful
Direction Requirement
Defendants contend the Court lacks personal jurisdiction because they did not purposefully
direct their activities at Kansas and therefore haven’t purposefully established sufficient minimum
contacts here. The Tenth Circuit has described at least four frameworks for evaluating the
sufficiency of a non-resident defendant’s contacts for purposes of specific personal jurisdiction.
See Old Republic Ins. Co. v. Cont’l Motors, Inc., 877 F.3d 895, 905, 909 n.21 (10th Cir. 2017).
These frameworks are variously premised on (1) the defendant’s continuing relationships with the
forum, (2) the defendant’s exploitation of commercial marketplaces in the forum, (3) the conduct
by the defendant for which harmful effects are felt in the forum, and (4) the defendant’s placement
of goods in the stream-of-commerce.2 Id.
Although there is some discussion about market exploitation, Plaintiff focuses on the third
framework (harmful effects).3 The harmful effects framework looks at the intentional conduct of
a defendant and assesses whether that intentional conduct targeted the forum state and had
substantial harmful effects there. Id. at 907. The Tenth Circuit instructs lower courts to examine
“whether the defendant deliberately directed its message at an audience in the forum state and
intended harm to the plaintiff occurring primarily or particularly in the forum state.” XMission,
L.C. v. Fluent LLC, 955 F.3d 833, 845 (10th Cir. 2020) (internal quotations and citation omitted).
2 	Plaintiff discusses at length the sliding-scale test first described by the Western District of Pennsylvania in Zippo
Manufacturing Corp. v. Zippo Dot Com, 952 F. Supp. 1119 (W.D. Pa. 1997). The Tenth Circuit has declined to
“take a definitive position” with respect to Zippo’s approach. Old Republic Ins. Co., 877 F.3d at 908 n.18.
3 	Plaintiff develops her market exploitation theory in perfunctory fashion and fails to address any of the various
factors the Tenth Circuit has described as bearing on this analysis in Old Republic Insurance Co. v. Continental
Motors, Inc. Plaintiff points to no nonconclusory uncontroverted allegations that (1) Defendants have a substantial
and regular volume of sales, customer base, or revenues in Kansas or (2) Defendants have advertised their site
extensively or have employed marketing for their site geographically targeted at Kansas. 877 F.3d at 914-16.
Plaintiff has not, therefore, demonstrated purposeful direction through the market exploitation framework.
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The important point is “whether the defendant intended its online content to create effects
specifically in the forum state.” Old Republic Ins. Co., 877 F.3d at 917 n.35 (emphasis added).
The gist of Plaintiff’s jurisdictional case is that Defendants knew people from Kansas were
accessing their websites, that they actively facilitated this access by using a CDN with an edge
server located just miles away from Kansas, and that they received money through subscriptions
and in the form of advertising revenue from Kansas users. Plaintiff also argues that Defendants
knew users from Kansas were accessing its site because Defendants could limit what content made
it into the forum based on the geographic preferences of the individuals who made content for their
sites. The inference Plaintiff asks the Court draw is that Defendants know where their users are
and are making intentional decisions (automated though they might be) about which users in which
places can access what content and are then facilitating that access by dint of a CDN with a nearby
server.
The Court is unpersuaded. The principal difficulty with Plaintiff’s jurisdictional case is that
a defendant’s knowledge or ability to foresee that its activities outside a forum might create effects
in the forum aren’t enough to create minimum contacts. Defendants’ awareness that traffic and
revenue were coming from Kansas do, of course, weigh in favor of finding jurisdiction. This is
after all part of what the Tenth Circuit held in Shrader v. Biddinger, 633 F.3d 1235, 1247-48 (10th
Cir. 2012), when it explained that some amount of knowledge of where one’s content is going is a
necessary condition for specific jurisdiction. But the Tenth Circuit’s opinion in Shrader is similarly
pellucid that this sort of knowledge isn’t enough absent some intentional or purposeful act by
Defendants. See id. And this is where Plaintiff’s case falters.
Plaintiff would have the Court draw the inference that Defendants intended the effects out
of which her claims arise be felt in Kansas based on (1) advertising revenue and subscription sales
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in Kansas, (2) the use of geotargeting to limit certain content from finding its way to certain fora,
and (3) Defendants’ use of Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. But even when these are taken in
combination with Defendants’ knowledge that some of their users are Kansas residents, the
inference Plaintiff seeks to have the Court draw isn’t available.
Plaintiff’s geotargeting argument requires the Court to draw a negative inference that
Defendants’ ability to restrict certain content from entering the forum must mean that whatever
content ended up there did so intentionally. But if this could support or demonstrate purposeful
direction, then a plaintiff would need only to allege that a defendant who operates a website could
have, but failed to, eliminate traffic to a particular forum. Embracing such a rule would run the
risk of subjecting those who operate websites to the sort of “universal jurisdiction” in the internet
context that appellate courts have regarded as clearly exceeding the limitations the Fourteenth
Amendment’s due process clause imposes.4 The Tenth Circuit in Shrader cautioned against this
very thing, instructing that “the maintenance of a website does not in and of itself subject the owner
or operator to personal jurisdiction, even for actions relating to the site, simply because it can be
accessed by residents of the forum state.” Id. at 1241 (collecting cases). What is necessary is some
indication that “a defendant deliberately directed” its content to the forum state and that it
“intended harm to the plaintiff occurring primarily or particularly in the forum state.” Id.
Defendants’ use of ad networks and subscription sales to monetize its traffic as indicia that
Defendants purposefully directed the activities out of which Plaintiff’s claims arise at Kansas also
falls short of the mark. Defendants’ receipt of revenue attributable to Kansas does not imply that
Defendants deliberately directed their website’s content at Kansas. This is part of what the Tenth
Circuit’s opinion in Old Republic Insurance Co. v. Continental Motors, Inc. teaches. That case
4 	Certainly, a defendant’s efforts to avoid certain jurisdictions would seem to suggest the defendant did not avail
itself of the forum.
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involved an aircraft that had crashed. The aircraft had been serviced in Colorado by a repair facility
that used an allegedly defective online aircraft repair manual that the defendant had maintained.
The plaintiff argued that personal jurisdiction could be had over the defendant in the District of
Colorado because the defendant offered paid subscriptions to various aircraft repair resources, and
the repair facility was a subscriber. The Tenth Circuit disagreed. Although the allegedly defective
manual had at one time been available only to the defendant’s paid subscribers, it was publicly
available when the member repair facility last serviced the aircraft at-issue. And in the Tenth
Circuit’s view, the sale of subscription resources in Colorado wasn’t a sufficiently meaningful
forum connection under the effects test absent evidence that the defendant intentionally or
purposefully directed its sales activities at that state’s residents. See Old Republic Ins. Co., 877
F.3d at 917.
Just as the generation of revenue or the sale of subscription services in the forum state was
an insufficient basis upon which to premise personal jurisdiction under the harmful effects
framework in Old Republic, so too is it insufficient here. Indeed, in the present case, any contacts
with Kansas created by advertising or sales of subscriptions are based on the fortuity of other users’
and subscribers’ locations. What others do to connect Defendants to Kansas is beside the point. A
defendant’s amenability to personal jurisdiction concerns the contacts the defendant itself makes
with a given forum, not the contacts plaintiffs or third parties make. E.g., Fluent LLC, 955 F.3d at
847.
Defendants’ use of the CloudFront CDN also does little to move the needle, jurisdictionally
speaking. As noted above, a CDN like CloudFront forms part of a website’s infrastructure and
consists of geographically disbursed servers that contain copies of a website’s content. CDNs allow
a website’s content to be delivered to users from a geographically proximate server. The idea is to
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prevent a decline in a website’s performance for users who are located far from where the website
is principally hosted. A CDN ensures Defendants’ websites’ content is delivered through a network
server that is geographically proximate to the forum, which, in turn, minimizes website load times.
Shorter load times are critical because website users tend to drop off when a website slows down.
But Defendants’ intention that their users be able to access their sites from a wide
geographic area is not – even coupled with the knowledge that revenue-generating traffic would
be coming from Kansas – the same as purposefully directing their activities at Kansas. As with the
ability to limit access from a particular geographic area, Plaintiff’s argument proves too much.
Defendants do not controvert that they use CloudFront to help them deliver content. Defendants
also do not controvert that a CloudFront edge server is located close to the forum. But there is
neither an allegation nor evidence that Defendants selected the locations of any of the edge servers
CloudFront employs or otherwise customized those CDNs to direct traffic more efficiently to
Kansas over other locations. Technical steps taken to make a universally accessible website easier
for all users to access no matter where they are located is no more purposeful direction than the
act of setting up the website in the first place. And just like the act of setting up a website, were
the indiscriminate use of a CDN or other technologies to indiscriminately facilitate content
delivery enough, “then the defense of personal jurisdiction, in the sense that a State has
geographically limited judicial power, would no longer exist.” Fluent LLC, 955 F.3d 844 (internal
quotations and citation omitted).5
5 	Plaintiff cites two cases from the Ninth Circuit, Doe v. WebGroup Czech, A.S., 93 F.4th 442 (9th Cir. 2024), and
Will Co. v. Ka Yeung Lee, 47 F.4th 917 (9th Cir. 2022), for the proposition that the use of a CDN within a country’s
geographic boundaries shows purposeful direction. Neither opinion binds this Court, and both have since been
overruled on grounds unrelated to the appellate court’s CDN analysis. Will Co. addressed the defendant’s decision
to host its website in the United States (in Utah) and use a North American CDN. WebGroup addressed the
jurisdictional significance of the defendants’ use of a U.S.-based CDN. But neither case does much work for
Plaintiff. Both cases concerned federal (rather than state) causes of action against non-U.S.-based defendants. The
mechanism for seeking jurisdiction over the defendants was through Rule 4(k)(2). This means that a condition
precedent to the assertion of jurisdiction was that personal jurisdiction wouldn’t exist in any single U.S. state.
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This, of course, does not mean that a website owner’s use of a CDN is never relevant. It
also does not mean that a website owner’s use of a CDN could never show purposeful direction.
It does mean that more is needed to determine how the CDN is used and whether the CDN is being
used to target a forum or an immediate region of which the forum is a part. But the Court need not
interrogate precisely what might or might not be enough to resolve this case. Here, Plaintiff simply
alleges that a CDN is being used and that the CDN has servers near the forum. This record is not
enough to carry Plaintiff’s admittedly light burden.6 Plaintiff 	does 	not 	make 	a 	prima 	facie
showing that Defendants intended their online content to create the effects in this forum out of
which her claims arise.
III. 	CONCLUSION
The Court concludes that Plaintiff fails to state a prima facie basis for this Court’s exercise
of personal jurisdiction based on the prevailing standards and binding law. 7, 8 The Court recognizes
That this was a premise of the Ninth Circuit’s analysis would seem to undermine – rather than support – Plaintiff’s
present contention that a nationwide, U.S.-based CDN supports the exercise of jurisdiction in any particular U.S.
state.
6 	See e.g., Patrick Lin, Internet Jurisdiction: Using Content Delivery Networks to Ascertain Intention, 24 V A. J.L.
& TECH. 1 (2020) (discussing CDNs and personal jurisdiction).
7 	Where jurisdiction is lacking, 28 U.S.C. § 1631 requires courts to consider whether they should transfer the case
to a district where jurisdiction exists rather than dismiss without prejudice. Section 1631 allows a court to transfer
an action in lieu of dismissal “if it is in the interest of justice.” Neither party specifically addresses § 1631, but a
court can address it sua sponte. Here, the Court has considered whether transfer under § 1631 is in the interest of
justice but finds dismissal without prejudice is appropriate instead. First, it’s unclear where Crakmedia would be
amenable to jurisdiction in the United States under a Kansas state law claim. Second, while it appears personal
jurisdiction likely exists over the remaining defendants in Washington state, it’s entirely possible these defendants
are also amenable to jurisdiction in another forum. And the Court is disinclined to pre-select a venue for Plaintiff
to the extent she could opt to re-file somewhere other than Washington.
8 	The Court notes Plaintiff’s perfunctory request in her response to Defendants’ motions for leave to amend her
complaint with the benefit of jurisdictional discovery. The Court denies the request. First, Plaintiff’s request for
leave to amend is improper. The Court is under no obligation to recognize a perfunctory, conditional request to
amend in a response to a motion to dismiss without a formal motion, an articulated basis for the request, or a
proposed amended complaint. E.g., Sullivan v. Univ. Kan. Hosp. Auth., 844 F. App’x 43, 51-52 (10th Cir. 2021).
Second, it’s Plaintiff’s burden to demonstrate the need for jurisdictional discovery and any resulting prejudice
from its denial. Breakthrough Mgmt. Grp. v. Chukchansi Gold Casino & Resort, 629 F.3d 1173, 1189-90 (10th
Cir. 2010). Plaintiff has not attempted to satisfy this burden. Plaintiff has not, for instance, demonstrated what
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the tension inherent in a doctrine premised on geographic limitations on its authority and the
peculiarly non-territorial quality of the internet. The Court has made its best effort to navigate this
developing area of the law. Nevertheless, the Court recognizes that this is an evolving arena that
will benefit from further appellate-court guidance.
THE COURT THEREFORE ORDERS that Defendants’ motions to dismiss for lack of
personal jurisdiction (Docs. 30, 32) are GRANTED. Plaintiff’s complaint is DISMISSED
WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Dated: February 10, 2026 	/s/ Holly L. Teeter
HOLLY L. TEETER
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
evidence she would seek to resolve controverted fact issues or to offer a more satisfactory factual showing. See
id. To the extent Plaintiff seeks jurisdictional discovery, the Court denies the request.
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