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January 24, 1999

State Lawmakers Ready Scores of Internet Bills

By JERI CLAUSING Bio
The contentious and complex debates over protecting children from the evils of cyberspace, controlling unwanted commercial e-mail and protecting consumer privacy online are expected to move to the statehouse level in coming months as legislatures convene around the country.

As was the case with the last session of Congress, which saw unprecedented action on Internet and high-tech issues, those who follow Internet legislation expect hundreds of bills to be filed by state lawmakers.



Christine M. Thompson / CyberTimes

Forty-nine of the 50 states will hold legislative sessions this year, with 46 of those scheduled to be underway by Feb. 2. During those sessions, some 1,200 to 1,500 proposals dealing with the Internet are expected to be filed, according to Paul Rusinoff, state policy counsel for the Internet Alliance, the largest high-tech and Internet trade association in the country.

"It's interesting if you look at this context," Rusinoff said. "We saw some of the first state bills dealing with the Internet in 1995. There were three of them. Last year, the association looked at over 700 in each and every state that referred to the Internet in one form or another. They were not all bills that we had trouble with, but there was just a lot of legislation. There's no question that this is a very hot topic."

"And I think as more and more legislators go online themselves, and start hearing from constituents, the issues are going to multiply."

Topping the list, he and officials with National Conference of State Legislatures and the United States Internet Council agree, will be bills that will try to protect children from adult material and online predators and measures to outlaw or try and regulate unsolicited commercial e-mail, called spam by annoyed Internet users.

The problem with Internet legislation is that it often tries to regulate a hard-to-regulate, global medium. And well-intentioned attempts to protect children from indecent materials and online predators, even those involving junk e-mail, often raise Constitutional questions regarding free speech and censorship.

Indeed, civil libertarians have won virtually every court challenge of attempts to limit minors' access to the dark side of the Internet, including a lawsuit against the original Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996, and state laws passed in recent years in New Mexico and New York. A second federal law, named the Child Online Protection Act but nicknamed CDA II, which was passed last year, is currently being challenged in federal court in Philadelphia.

"I don't think, personally, that there is going to be much appetite for content-control legislation in state legislatures because they realize that is going to be a very difficult to accomplish," said Mark Q. Rhoads, legislative director of USIC, a coalition of Internet and high-tech companies formed in 1996 specifically to work on Internet legislation at the state level.

Although he expects a number of content-control bills "to be put in the hopper," he said lawmakers "are more likely are to move in the direction of trying to empower parents to more intelligently supervise their children's online time" with filters and other new technology.

A number of spam bills are also expected. Last year, legislation attempting to control commercial e-mail was introduced in 17 states. Two bills were passed, in Washington and California, bringing to three the number of states with spam laws now on the books. Nevada was the first, passing a bill in 1997.

"Obviously, the medium itself is intensely local and intensely global, all at the same time," Rhoads said. "In the sense that it touches people in states and issues develop, states are going to want to regulate, but there's always been questions about states regulating things in the stream of interstate commerce."

While some argue that it is seems futile for a state to try to regulate e-mail on a global network, proponents say such laws can help slow the barrage of unsolicited messages that often tout get-rich-schemes and adult-oriented products.

The Washington spam law prohibits companies from sending e-mail with a misleading subject line or false return address to Internet users in the state. California's law also requires that all spam sent to residents of the state contain the word "advertisement" in the subject line.

California enacted a second law that allows owners of computer systems in California to sue spammers that trespass on their computer systems and to recover losses caused by network clogs or crashes.

Rhoads and Rusinoff said they also expect the federal debate over whether or not laws are needed to protect consumer privacy online to move to the state level. They also expect to see bills attempting to outlaw online gambling, and a number of measures to establish digital signatures, online notary publics and other means of verifying identities on the Internet so that more private and government business can be conducted online, Rhoads said.

Because Congress has passed a three-year moratorium on new state and local taxes on Internet services and Internet commerce, Internet taxes are not expected to be an issue in state legislatures.

Still, Rhoads said, state lawmakers will be "watching very closely" the work over the next two years of a special Congressional Commission appointed to study Internet tax issues because right now the taxing of Internet goods largely follow the same rules as mail order catalogs, "and the state's feel they have been burned -- they feel they've lost a lot of revenue."

Despite the high number of Internet bills expected, Rusinoff and Rhoads said they expect few to make it into law. But the flurry of legislation should serve one good: raising the awareness of the importance of forming new committees and state offices to deal with Internet issues.

"One of the odd features of the state policy environment right now is that there is not really a committee structure to deal with the Internet," Rhoads said. "Only four or five states have science or technology committees."

"One of the things that my organization is trying to do, we are trying to sponsor conversations between people who are building the Internet and policy makers," he said. "What is important is that they understand that there are policy implications that flow from the fact that the Internet is not geographically based and it is chaotic."

Rusinoff, whose group worked with the State of Virginia to craft the first comprehensive state-based Internet policy agenda, says his group will be urging other states to follow that model.

The Virginia proposal aims to address a wide range of issues. It calls for tougher laws against sexually soliciting minors via the Internet or posting a child's contact information on a pornographic Web site; a requirement that Web sites clearly post what private information they collect and how it is used, and a spam law that would allow unsolicited bulk e-mail that is "fraudulent, unauthorized, or otherwise illegal [to be] prosecuted just as it would in any other medium."

It also proposed making online transactions and contracts legally binding and would require the state to offer more government services over the Internet.

Rusinoff says the Virginia proposal "strikes the perfect balance between self-regulation and government regulation."

"This is the first state where we have really gotten proactive, where we sat down and came to a common ground on what a state should do," Rusinoff said. "We will be very active in promoting the Virginia Act as model legislation."


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Jeri Clausing at jeri@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.



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