Our job here at TLF is generally to talk about policy as opinion leaders, but I tend to be a little campaign-y sometimes. When I see something I don’t like, I’ll use this platform to sound off about it.
It appears that ProFlowers.com engages in a shady practice: handing customers who accept a “special offer” from them to a company that charges people a monthly fee for what appears to be some kind of credit monitoring service. There are write-ups of varying depth and quality here, here, here, and here.
Question: Does the Internet provide enough feedback to suppress this practice? How could the e-commerce ecosystem be changed to alert people about this kind of thing ahead of time?
Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.
Should we each run a “scam” search on new online businesses before we deal with them? Maybe so. But that’s a little clunky. With the popularity of Firefox plug-ins for problem solving around here, maybe one of the consumer review/complaint sites could develop a plug-in to provide people reviews of a retailer as they visit the site.
I hope that prompting a conversation around the apparent ProFlowers.com credit card ripoff scam will alert savvy shoppers to a risk of doing business with them. (For the sake of searchability, feel free to blog a little bit yourself about the apparent ProFlowers credit card ripoff scam.) Perhaps this discussion will also generate a systemic fix that preempts shady dealings of the type alleged here.
Jonathan Frieden (who runs the e-commerce law blog) has a nice, pithy summary of Section 230:
If the “essential published content” is willingly provided by a third-party, the interactive computer service provider publishing that content enjoys the full immunity afforded by Section 230.
Amen, brother! I noted Eric Goldman’s excellent outline about Section 230 back in June. As Adam has noted, Section 230 is about more than just protecting online intermediaries bottom line or even about freeing them to provide the content and services we all take for granted.
Section 230 is the very cornerstone of Internet Freedom, the law that makes possible Robert Nozick’s “framework for utopias”: Online communities (“utopias”) can flourish in their infinite variety only because those who build, host or enable access to such communities (social network operators, search engines, aggregators, etc.) do not have to worry about legal liability for user-generated content. The fundamental difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 lies in the movement of online speech away from individual websites where the speaker was operator to online speech platforms where the potential number of speakers is essentially unlimited. This ongoing shift makes Section 230 more important than ever.
Never before has it been so easy for users to “vote with their feet,” sorting themselves into communities of their own choosing, and not since the the 1890 Census declared the American frontier “closed” has it been been so easy for the individual to start entirely new communities if they don’t like their current options.
Back in June, NetChoice introduced the iAWFUL (the Internet Advocates’ Watchlist for Ugly Laws) list as part of a broader effort to push back against America’s worst Internet legislation. Two months have passed, and while many of the bills in the top 10 have changed, they remain every bit as AWFUL.
Earlier today NetChoice unveiled the first major update of iAWFUL, which lists the 10 worst Internet bills/laws in America. The updated list includes five new items, with new laws in the top 2 slots.
It’s worth mentioning a few that fell off the list, in large part thanks to the pressure that Internet advocates exerted through iAWFUL:
#2 on the June iAWFUL list was a California bill that would have forced unworkable technical restrictions on the posting of photos to social networking pages. The bill’s sponsor responded by working with Internet advocates to fix problems with the measure.
#3 on the June iAWFUL list was a bill in Connecticut that would have required sales tax collection by out-of-state businesses that pay commissions to in-state affiliates. The Governor heard our concerns about the impact on in-state publishers and school charities, and has thus far kept this measure off the table in budget negotiations.
#5 on the June iAWFUL list was a Connecticut bill to let police conduct searches of homes where goods were being stored by online dealers – without having to obtain a search warrant. Thanks to iAWFUL publicity, this bill stalled in the House.
This is what iAWFUL is all about: creating positive change through informed advocacy.
Now for the bad news. For every measure that fell off the iAWFUL list, we found a truly AWFUL replacement. Continue reading →
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)
We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this outline. We hope this outline serves as the foundation of a book we eventually want to pen defending what we regard as “Real Internet Freedom.” [Note: Here’s a printer-friendly version, which we also have embedded down below as a Scribd document.]
I. What is Cyber-Libertarianism?
Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online.
Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!” The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.
Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.
Continue reading →
Eric Goldman offers a terrific—and concise—summary of Section 230 and how courts have recently interpreted its grant of broad immunity to online intermediaries, most notably:
47 USC 230 tries to divide online content into first party content and third party content. In its simplest form, 230 says that online actors can’t be liable for third party content unless (1) ECPA, (2) federal criminal enforcement, or (3) IP claims.
It’s worth reading the rest.
It seems that Amazon has made good on their threat and terminated all Amazon Associates affiliate accounts belonging to individuals and companies located within the state of North Carolina.
Now we get to see if the state legislature will formally back off the proposal so Amazon can reinstate the affiliate accounts. This will definitely be fun to watch.
Welcome to the jungle
We take it day by day
If you want it you’re gonna bleed
But it’s the price you pay
Amazon.com announced yesterday that it won’t be paying the price of affiliate advertising in North Carolina if the state uses it to assert nexus for sales tax collection. It will stop using affiliates in the Tar Heel state, which is what Overstock did when New York considered the affiliate nexus approach.
States are wrong-headed when it comes to asserting tax nexus just because some companies use a web-based network of affiliates to help advertise their products. As I’ve discussed before, affiliates are more akin to in-state advertisers, not sales reps.
Furthermore, states that pass these affiliate nexus bills really end up hurting in-state companies that rely on Internet advertising. At a time when companies are struggling for ways to make money on the Internet, we think now is a particularly bad time to tax Internet marketing.
North Carolina should stay out of the affiliate tax jungle. It’s constitutionally messy, bad policy…and as Guns ‘N Roses mildly stated, it’ gonna bring you down – huh!
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
This morning, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers’ Expectations.” If nothing else, it promises to be quite entertaining: With full-time Google bashers Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland on the agenda, the likelihood that top Google officials will be burned in effigy appears high!
Chester, self-appointed spokesman for what one might call the People for the Ethical Treatment of Data (PETD) movement, is sure to rant and rave about the impending techno-apocalypse that will, like all his other Chicken-Little scenarios, befall us all if online advertisers were permitted to better tailor ads to consumers’ liking. After all, can you imagine the nightmare of less annoying ads that might actually convey more useful information to consumers? Isn’t serving up “untargeted” dumb banner ads for Viagra to young women and Victoria’s Secret ads to Catholic school kids the pinnacle of modern online advertising? Gods forbid we actually make advertising more relevant and interest-based! (Those Catholic school boys may appreciate the lingerie ads, but few will likely buy bras.)
Anyway, according to National Journal’s Tech Daily Dose, the hearing lineup also includes:
- Charles Curran, Executive Director, Network Advertising Initiative
- Christopher Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
- Edward Felten, Director, Center for IT Policy, Princeton University
- Anne Toth, Chief Privacy Officer & Vice President, Policy, Yahoo!
- Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel, Google
That’s an interesting group and we’re sure that they will say interesting things about the issue. Nonetheless, because four of them have a corporate affiliation that fact will inevitably be used by some critics to dismiss what they have to say about the sensibility of more targeted or interest-based forms of online advertising. So, we’d like to offer a few thoughts and pose a few questions to make sure that Committee members understand why, regardless of what it means for any particular online operator, targeting online advertising is very pro-consumer and essential to the future of online content, culture, and competition. As Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg has noted, “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media.” Much of the “free speech” we all cherish isn’t really free, but ad-supported!
Continue reading →
There’s a hearing going on as I write on a Louisiana bill (HB 569) that would create a new tax on the Internet bills of consumers, despite the fact that there’s a federal moratorium prohibiting it.
We just heard Attorney General James D. “Buddy” Caldwell say that this isn’t a “tax”, it’s a “fee.” Louisiana is taking an interesting approach – HB 569 would impose a tax of 15 cents per month on ISP subscribers that would go to preventing and prosecuting Internet-based crimes against children. AG Caldwell claims that it is merely a “usage fee” — the price we pay for using the Internet.
But the Internet Tax Freedom Act explicitly sought to prevent the imposition of a tax that simply used different terminology. The Act defines a tax as:
(i) any charge imposed by any governmental entity for the purpose of generating revenues for governmental purposes, and is not a fee imposed for a specific privilege, service, or benefit conferred; or
(ii) the imposition on a seller of an obligation to collect and to remit to a governmental entity any sales or use tax imposed on a buyer by a governmental entity.
Under this definition, a charge on Internet access is not like a fee imposed for recording a mortgage, for example. When you pay a recording fee, you pay for the costs you impose on the government for handling your transaction. If you were to pay a “usage fee” for law enforcement to deal with online safety, you’re paying for general services, something that law enforcement/government should be doing anyway to protect the public. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.