[epub] RE: New MI and UT email compliance laws, July 1st enacted

[Dawn Rivers Baker <editor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:46 PM 7/1/05, you wrote:
> I just wrote to my governor, who else should I be writing to.
> This situation - a vendetta against business owners, has to stop.

I'm going to be contacting a couple of folks, too.

Elected representatives are a good idea. But I'm also working with a group 
who'll be contacting the SBA's Office of Advocacy. I plan to contact 
Regional Advocates for Region II (where I live), Region V (which includes 
Michigan) and Region VIII (which includes Utah), as well as the guy in the 
Washington office who specializes in regulatory affairs involving 
telecommunications and the Internet. You can get the regional contact 
information for the various Regional Offices of the SBA Office of Advocacy 
at http://www.sba.gov/advo/region.html.

Several states have enacted their own versions of the federal Regulatory 
Flexibility Act (which requires regulators to consider the impact of their 
rules on small businesses and to consider less costly alternatives), but 
unfortunately, neither Utah nor Michigan are among them. Still, Advocacy's 
job is to go to bat for small businesses who are getting beaten up by 
insane regulators. Their staff is relatively small so the odds are very 
good that they don't know about this. They need a heads up.

I'm also inclined to agree with the suggestion that was made to me to 
contact the FTC, to ask them to render an opinion on this. What these laws 
are doing essentially is passing legislation that deals with commercial 
email. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, any laws passed by the states to regulate 
commercial email are superceded by the federal law. Both states are making 
the sending of prohibited emails to minors into a criminal offense, 
transforming this from a commercial email issue to a cybercrime issue.  The 
FTC may disagree that these laws are not superceded by CAN-SPAM, but I 
don't know if they'll do anything about it.

I also don't know if the states' argument would stand up to judicial 
scrutiny or not. The only way to get that sorted out would be for somebody 
to sue and take the thing before a judge.

Then, too, there's also the Commerce Clause of the constitution, which 
prohibits the states from passing legislation that unduly burdens and/or 
interferes with interstate commerce. I think this one would qualify but, 
again, you'd need somebody to file a law suit in order to get the courts to 
render that decision.

Advocacy could file such a law suit. So could the FTC, but my money would 
be on Advocacy. That's who I'll be focusing my contact on.

Cheers!
Dawn



Dawn Rivers Baker
Editor/Publisher

The MicroEnterprise Journal
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