In the past week, both Iowa and Hawaii have jumped on the child protection band wagon with because of what has to be one of the most misdirected lobbying campaigns designed to get legislators to believe that one state’s law can impact the flow of spam and pornography on the internet. As the father of two children, I abhor some of the pornographic emails and adult oriented promotions that flood inboxes. It is easy to get any parent or normal adult upset at the thought of such email ending up in a child’s email box. That’s why lobbyists seem to have no difficulty in getting legislative sponsors for the ridiculous child registry legislation that has been surfacing in many states.
There is a major missing component in this concept. Any organization willing to send such email today is unlikely to be deterred by the laws in one state, and this is complicated by the fact that much of this material is being sent from foreign countries. With limited state resources, it is doubtful whether the states of Hawaii or Iowa will be sending the state police to Russia very soon to arrest the sender of any such mail.
What is not difficult is to see the financial motivation behind this legislation. On the surface, the concept of new dollars flowing into state coffers from emailers who have to comply with the laws sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, this money is going to flow from legitimate businesses that sell products that shouldn’t be sold to minors (i.e., automobiles, real estate, motorcycles). These types of organizations that are legitimately sending relevant permission-based email will want to comply with the laws. However it doesn’t take a Harvard economics professor to calculate that sending email in the future will become financially prohibitive if each state is charging more to process an email list against their registry than many companies are paying to send their mail, and these costs are incurred on a monthly basis. When you dig a little deeper, and you look at the two states where such legislation has passed, Michigan and Utah, and realize that 80% of the revenue from those two states is ending up in the pockets of the single company that is able to process and house the registries, that the true objective of the lobbyists, who are so persuasively moving legislators is revealed.
The one good thing in the entire procedure is knowing that sometimes the legislative process does work, and sanity rules. Recently Representative Jack Franks of Illinois made the decision to withdraw a similar bill, which he had initially sponsored after learning the true impact and effects that this poorly conceived legislation would cause.
So for now, keep your eye on all of the states that haven’t passed this legislation and hope that other legislators see through this thin veneer of deception and misdirection. If you would like to read more about how legislators in Utah and Michigan were hoodwinked, read Brian Livingson's great article published last year
Comments