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Utah's Third Attempt To Regulate Keywords Fails
Eric Goldman writes "Earlier this month, we discussed HB 450, the Utah Legislature's third attempt to regulate keyword advertising after the past two efforts failed miserably. The latest attempt barely passed the Utah House, aided in part by a 'yes' vote from Representative Jennifer Seelig, who also happens to be a lobbyist-employee of 1-800 Contacts, the principal advocate of HB 450. Nevertheless, HB 450 died in the Utah Senate without a vote when the Utah Legislature adjourned last night. Despite the seeming good news, it would be surprising if the Utah Legislature didn't try a fourth time to regulate keyword advertising in a future session."
I'm sure they'll eventually try something even dumber...like legislating that Pluto is a planet...
Like...here...in Illinois...
DOH!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I can't imagine any legislature would even consider this seriously since there is no way for them to enforce this except for those businesses that deal in keywords and have servers in Utah and the company only deals in Utah (i.e. not on the internet). I would think that other than that, the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution applies and they would not be able to regulate it at the state level. Is this the case? I am usually wrong so I would like someone with a better sense of the law to comment on this.
From what I can extract from the less than informative articles referenced, these bills attempt to protect Utah (read Mormon) companies from having to compete with out-of-state companies that provide the same goods and services. Something tells me this would eventually be shot down on constitutional grounds. I mean, imagine the state legislature of Maine trying to ban advertising for Coke because there's a Maine registered brand called Maine's Best Maple Cola (I'm just making this up).
But yes, they get elected and they think they have to DO SOMETHING. Lulz.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Your signature suggests a bias. Might look into changing that.
I think what bothers a lot of people is that we were told for many years "Oh, no. We have to have free markets. We must deregulate everything!", and then many decided to take an unethical approach to how they go about their business and it turned out that they might not have been trustworthy after all. In the last days of the previous administration, they reversed course into a "worst of both worlds" scenario: Remove all limitations and then fund them to keep them afloat when their machinations didn't pan out. (I don't know where the new administration is going with this, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that a huge policy swing towards "No more federal aid" might not make as much sense as a gradual approach towards change.)
But, to answer your question, heavily-regulated markets in Europe didn't keep them from investing outside of their local market. We fucked up, and so the impact doesn't stop at our borders, every foreign investor gets to feel the pinch as well.
I can't imagine any legislature would even consider this seriously since there is no way for them to enforce this except for those businesses that deal in keywords and have servers in Utah and the company only deals in Utah (i.e. not on the internet). I would think that other than that, the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution applies and they would not be able to regulate it at the state level. Is this the case? I am usually wrong so I would like someone with a better sense of the law to comment on this.
This has nothing to do with the law; it has to do with politics.
You grossly over estimate the altruism, intelligence, and motives of politicians. This legislation is designed to get votes. Period. Some cry baby vocal minority out there wants this and the rest of the population, more than likely, doesn't give a shit.
In the meantime, the politicians get the support of the vocal obnoxious cry baby group (volunteer labor and money), which then enables said politicians get to keep their over paid cushy jobs.
Simple.
Any time you have a law like this being proposed (especially one being proposed again and again), there is some special interest group or big company or lobby group pushing for it. Who is doing it in this case and why pick Utah as the place to lobby for it? (a testbed to get similar laws passed in other states?)
Basically these characters want "free markets" when they are doing well and taxpayer-funded socialism when they are not. Whereas what we had in the U.S. until the '30s was the "boom and bust" cycle, fueling ever greater bubbles and collapses until it finally became apparent that the nation couldn't take much more of this nonsense. And then along came the Neonuts and it was back on the ferris wheel again.
But yes, everything you say is spot on and cogent.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Actually, the member states of the EU are in widely varying degrees of recession. The UK is totally and utterly screwed, near bankruptcy -- mainly because it was Bush's lapdog for a decade, because its Neues Arbeit Regime looked after itself first, and because they are nothing more than the willing puppets of corporate interests.
Iceland is screwed because it depended on the UK too much. France and Germany are affected, but they do have much more banking regulation and it's nothing like as bad. The other member states are affected less still for the same reasons.
This is why there is so much disagreement at the G20 talks right now -- many EU countries are actually doing ok, despite the recession, and don't want the US and UK imposing desperate Keynsian burn and spend tactics. Since, they don't need them, and would that probably drive them further into depression and instability, just like the US and UK.
The whole of this mess though, does relate to this article. The fundamental problem in today's society is that corporate interests overrule the will of the people. Governments everywhere are bought and sold. I have no idea how we fix this -- corporations are too powerful. However, we really, really, really need to. All of us, in every country.
Maybe it starts with corporate employees from grassroots up. If you work for a corporation, why do you allow all life on Earth to be exploited for your masters bidding? You can change things, you have free will, and a duty to us all. Those of us who don't work in corporations really can't do anything it seems.
Great! First Utah gives us Orrin Hatch and the DMCA and now this? Can the rest of America vote to replace Utah with Puerto Rico?
Right? At least that's what (almost) everybody keeps telling me. "We need government to regulate business because a free market doesn't work, as we discovered with the current recession." Utah's Legislature is just regulating the advertising market as it's "supposed" to do. They are doing their job, so where's the problem?
Nice attempt at a strawman using an absolute blanket statement (typical Repuglican tactic) but you're wrong. The free market usually works most of the time. Sometimes however regulation is an absolute necessity because companies only have one obligation and that is to make a profit.
Making a profit != Best interests of America
Consider the current economic mess the U.S. is in. I'll throw you this bone, it DID start under Clinton when he pressured Fannie/Freddie to loosen lending requirements to let more people borrow. Fannie and Freddie worked for so many years because they DID have such tight lending requirements.
When it became possible for everyone with a pulse to get a mortgage by not using Freddie/Fannie but with unregulated companies taking their place, you have the rise of the CDOs against mortgage backed securities and the problem with these CDOs is that they can be resold and resold countless times without regulation.
Credit Default Swaps written against these is ultimately what brought America into this. SO it's not a partisan issue although you could say with CDOs/CDS being sold for 8 years under Bush why they never looked into it.
It was pure greed. The system worked fine under Fannie/Freddie when the tight requirements (READ: REGULATION) was in place.
Here's another analogy since I can't write it in crayon for you.
Imagine that your neighbor buys his 16 year old son a $30,000 V8 Mustang to celebrate the kid's newly acquired driver's license. Say you think the kid is going to wreck the car, because you know what a reckless brat he is. So you take out an insurance policy for the value of his car. Only you don't take just one. You take 100, maybe 1000. Say everyone else in your neighborhood does the same thing, because there are no insurance regulations that prevent it. Now you have a $30,000 dollar unsecured asset insured for $300,000,000, underwritten by an entity with nowhere near the assets to cover all the bets if the kid wrecks the car. Throw short sellers into the mix, and you have some of the neighbors giving the kid a fifth of Jack Daniels before his Friday night date.
Sometimes regulation is a good thing.
Some of us don't look at the party affiliation before determining whether the position is stupid or not. Unlike the Neonuts who will complain about something when a Democrat does it and then laud it as just beneath the second coming of Christ when a Republican does it.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
So basically you're saying that, since people lie, there's no point in making any rules.
I'm just going to go ahead and disagree with you on that one.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It's like Quebec and the referendum they try to push through every so often. Basically, it sucks for everyone except the person trying to push their agenda through.
They can try to push through their agenda a hundred times. All it takes is a single ONE of those to go through, and everything is fucked forever. Because once it goes through, there's no way it will ever go back again.
I see it as akin to brute-forcing a password or something. Keep trying over and over again, and eventually you'll get through. And once you do, it can't be undone.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
You forgot Eastern Europe. It experienced a bubble similar to the U.S. housing market, with large investments from the west in various homes/companies that are now going bankrupt.
BTW - watch the EU government carefully. During the 30s the U.S. government made a huge power grab, taking-over tasks traditionally controlled by the state governments, so that Washington became the power. I expect the EU government to do the same thing - and you'll endup kowtowing to Brussels as your focus.
>>>Maybe it starts with corporate employees from grassroots up. If you work for a corporation, why do you allow all life on Earth to be exploited for your masters bidding? You can change things, you have free will, and a duty to us all.
>>>
That leads to getting fired. The employee-corporate relationship is a lot like serf-to-landlord. You do what you're told or you get removed, and then you have no way to feed yourself.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>since people lie, there's no point in making any rules
No. Since businessmen and politicians lie ("Yeah it's safe to buy a $400,000 home even though you only earn $20,000 a year"), you can't trust either of them. Neither corporations nor governments can be trusted, so stop looking to them for advice. Instead rely on yourself.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
On what planet was the financial system deregulated? This occurred in one of the most extremely regulated and least free industries we have. It makes other "heavily regulated" industries look positively libertine.
The problem was not with "deregulation", but with pervasively *bad* regulation that was designed more for political expediency than robust markets (e.g. FASB 157). The market will always find the equilibrium tacitly created by the government, but the government never takes responsibility for the unintended consequences of its regulatory actions even when the potential consequences were well understood at the time the regulations were implemented. The problem was not deregulation, it was too much bad regulation.
Compounding this was a lack of enforcement of regulations, due in large part to regulatory capture. I would point out, for example, that Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to be the head of the SEC, the very same person responsible for ignoring or stonewalling whistleblowers in a number of high-profile fraud cases, including the Madoff case. When a person so obviously incompetent at enforcing regulations or policing fraud gets promoted to the top enforcement position, it strongly suggests that regulations are not about regulating.