The Voice of the eCommerce Industry

Missouri Possible: Show Us the Way to Best Deal with Internet Harassment

Here's your assignment: you're a state governor who's up for re-election, and your state is still reeling in the wake of a high-publicity suicide by a teenage girl brought upon by inflammatory statements communicated through a popular social networking website. 

What do you do? Panic and quickly push through a reactive new law, (maybe even sock it to the social networking industry), or do you study the issue to come up with a sound approach? If you're the Governor of Missouri, you create a multi-disciplinary task force to review current law and enforcement related to Internet harassment and recommend changes to better protect the citizens of your state. 

Yesterday I was in Jefferson City to participate in this task force, which included representatives from the law enforcement, nonprofit, academic, mental health, and business communities. The task force met to specifically create the new crime of cyber-harassment in response to Megan Meier's suicide almost a year ago, but still newsworthy and on the minds of many people as this New York Times article from last week shows. 

Cyber-harassment can be devastating and dangerous to victims. Due to the ease of sending electronic communications, harassment that occurs online can be instant, frequent, anonymous, and permanently public. Cyber-harassers can easily impersonate their victims and even encourage third parties to unwittingly "flame" and harass a victim. 

Tina Meier, Megan's mom, opened up our task force meeting by recounting the tragic story of her daughter's death. Megan was a 13 year old girl that had befriended what she thought was a boy on MySpace but turned out to be an adult neighbor that lived next-door. "Josh Evans" was a fiction allegedly created to see what Megan was saying about the neighbor's own daughter, and over a period of a month earned Megan's trust and endearment. But one day this adult sent Megan's world crashing when the fictitious boy turned against Megan, who for a period of hours sent a barrage of mean and harassing communications. Severely distraught and at the bottom of her emotional roller coaster, Megan took her own life. 

Missouri and federal prosecutors could not pursue a case based on existing stalking, harassment and child endangerment. But it should be a crime for somebody to use Internet (or any other form of communications technology) to intentionally engage in conduct that would cause a reasonable person (especially children) severe emotional distress, not just fear for her physical safety. 

As policymakers look to create cyber-harassment laws, they should engage in the kind of analysis that applies to any new law:  consider whether the law will be effective, the costs to enforce the new law, and any potentially unintended consequences.  Harassment can be perpetrated in number of technological ways, whether it is by phone, fax, email, blog postings, or old fashioned pen and paper. This begs the question of why we should refer to harassment using the Internet as an "Internet" or "Cyber" crime. Internet communications may have created new avenues to harass, but it's still harassment no matter how one does it. That's why any new laws (if they are deemed necessary to fill gaps in current law) should, as much as possible, be technology neutral and focus on bad acts, not technology.

Foremost, I discussed the ways that industry is working to keep users safe and help law enforcement to catch the bad guys. All of the major ISPs provide parental control software, often for free (see Adam Thierer's survey of online tools). MySpace is leading the industry with innovations to keep bad actors off  and to monitor for bad conduct on its site. And companies like AOL, Microsoft, MySpace and Yahoo! regularly interact with law enforcement to help provide technical training and provide information in response to subpoenas. 

Cyber-harassment is the narrow focus of the task force, but the scope of this issue is broad. Is harassment limited to adults harassing children or other adults, or does it include child vs. child too? Or is a child harassing another child what we'd call "cyber-bullying", which is undesirable but may not be criminal behavior? How do we incorporate a reasonable person standard when, as was the case with Megan, a victim is particularly susceptible to the effects of harassing conduct, due to diminished capacity or depression? To what extent should schools be involved in responding to cyber-bullying? 

The task force will be dealing with these and other tough issues as it drafts cyber-harassment legislation. If Missouri can get it right, than the "show me" state can be an example for other states on how to create and draft well-targeted and effective legislation, even on the heels of tragedy. 

-Braden

Ohio Probing Hannah Montana Ticket Sales

Ohio State Senator Eric Kearney suspects that ticket sales for the Hannah Montana concert are being manipulated.  Stand in line, Senator.  We couldn’t agree more (see my blog post from November 21 – “Did you score Hannah Montana tickets?”).  We commend Senator Kearney’s request to the Ohio state attorney general to investigate this issue.

Senator Kearney has requested that the Ohio ticket industry be examined to determine why so many of the hottest shows and sporting events seem to be sold out before tickets even go on sale.  We, of course, have our theories – including drummed-up hype created by the concert promoters to create the kind of mass hysteria we see around the Hannah Montana concert.

Last week, new dates were added to the tour for January and parents are once again going through the dance of trying to get tickets for their kids.

If Ohio can make some headway on this issue, perhaps changes can be put in place that will enable concert-goers to pay a fair price for a show they want to see, without all the drama.

A Free Speech Playbook for American Companies Doing Business Overseas

Do U.S. Internet companies "betray free speech"? A recent New York Times editorial believes so, and calls out Yahoo in particular for having a "gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression." But the editorial missed the point, as my colleague Steve DelBianco spelled out in a letter-to-the-editor this past weekend:

Leading Internet companies want to do everything possible to protect their customers, and several are working with human rights advocates to develop ways to more effectively push back on the demands of repressive regimes.

Despite your blithe assertion, however, these companies need to abide by the laws of the land. These companies worry not only about customers going to jail but also their own employees. For example, the head of eBay India was arrested when a user posted an objectionable video to an eBay site.

The real question is as Steve asks: In a China with no American content or online services, will the goals of free speech and civil rights be better served? The answer should be an obvious and emphatic "No!"

We don't really want our companies to get up and leave. Rather, we need a "playbook" of realistic tactics online companies can use to effectively push back on government demands for removing content or revealing user information.

Been There, Done That

It feels like Groundhog Day.  The Simplified Sales Tax Project (SSTP) won't seem to go away, despite widespread agreement that it is actually not that simple and not necessary.

(The Nov 28 issue of Forbes provides a good summary -

http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/11/28/consumers-congress-tax-biz-wash-cz_atg_1128beltway.html)

But today presents yet another opportunity for advocates and detractors to testify before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law about this topic.  At issue is whether 15 states who have adopted the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement have sufficiently simplified a sales tax system that the Supreme Court found to be an unreasonable burden on interstate commerce. These states are now asking Congress for a nationwide mandate to force all out-of-state retailers to collect and remit sales tax for any goods sold to residents of the “simplified” states.

SSTP Member states have always known that they could go back to the Supreme Court and attempt to prove that they have truly eliminated the unreasonable burden on interstate commerce that was found in the 1992 Quill ruling.  Instead, the SSTP states chose to avoid the harsh judgment of the Court, by asking Congress to grant them the power to impose these unreasonable burdens on out-of-state businesses.

Despite 6 years of effort, the actual simplification achieved by the SSTP is not sufficient enough to show Congress that it should abandon its role in protecting interstate commerce.  In fact, the SSTP has shown that simplification has become just a slogan.  Simplification is proving to be much more difficult than anyone imagined.

The SSTP Governing Board is now working on a new dual-sourcing scheme to accommodate both origin and destination based taxes at the same time despite being two steps removed from the original simplification vision of one-rate-per-state.  Not to mention that the cost to businesses that would be forced to implement new systems and to collect, file and remit the Streamlined Sales Tax could be substantial, a fact that SSTP proponents would prefer to avoid.

Further, the holiday shopping season is making tax officials anxious to collect any unpaid sales & use tax on purchases made from out-of-state catalogs and websites. But more and more online commerce is done by multi-channel retailers who already collect sales tax for all the states where they have stores and facilities.  According to a recent survey, more than half of the sales taxes owed by consumers on the online purchases were being collected anyway.

A more reasonable approach would be to amend HR 3396 to give Member States some of the authority they seek, but stop short of a national mandate on sellers in every state.  Congress could require collection not by all sellers but by sellers in the other SSTP Member States – essentially approving a voluntary multi-state tax compact.  That would at least give Member States a chance to prove they can develop and sustain true simplification. 

Steve DelBianco

executive director, NetChoice