Utah AG Vows to Spread Registry Idiocy

OK, so it wasn’t much of a surprise last week when a federal judge dismissed porn trade group the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against Utah’s comically misnamed child-protection do-not-e-mail registry.

What was disconcerting, though, was a vow Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff made in the press release touting his victory.

"My goal now is to take the registry nationwide," said Shurtleff. "This legal victory means other states will follow Utah's lead and stop pornographers from contacting children."

Shurtleff reportedly plans to talk about the registry at a meeting with the National Association of Attorneys General in February.

Essentially, Shurtleff is vowing to spread a program that aims to protect children from offensive material on a communications medium they rarely use by punishing marketers who aren’t the problem.

Tried getting hold of anyone under 21 by e-mail lately? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a response.

For those who are unaware, two incredibly twisted laws went into effect in Michigan and Utah in 2005 establishing so-called children's protection registries that allow parents and guardians to enter children's e-mail addresses and “other contact points” as off limits to material that is illegal for minors to view or buy.

Marketers who want to send e-mail with content inappropriate for minors are required to scrub their lists against the registries each month in Utah and Michigan for $5 and $7, respectively, per 1,000 e-mail addresses.

So what has Utah’s registry done so far?

According to court records, the state has cited 10 mailers for allegedly breaking its child no-e-mail law and hasn’t collected a cent in fines.

Moreover, common sense says the amount of adult-oriented spam being sent to registered addresses hasn’t dropped in the least. By definition, companies that scrub their lists against the registry aren’t the spammers responsible for polluting people’s inboxes with offensive garbage.

As a result, law-abiding marketers continue to pay into two registries that have accomplished nothing beyond shaking them down while Shurtleff vows to get other states to adopt the same cockamamie system—a system, by the way, that would price adult-oriented material out of the marketplace if too many states adopted it, ironically starving said system of funds.

“The program is a complete failure,” said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, in a statement. “No state with any fiscal intelligence whatsoever would even consider such a program.”

While it would be nice to take comfort in Duke’s “fiscal-intelligence” assessment of Utah’s child no-e-mail program’s chances of spreading to other states, it’s difficult to do so.

Marketers may understandably take comfort in the fact that the Email Sender and Provider Coalition was able to head off child-no-e-mail legislation in six states in 2006, but those victories were won under the threat of litigation—litigation that has just ended with Utah and Michigan’s registries still leeching off of law-abiding marketers.

Many marketers may also take comfort in the idea that child-no-e-mail laws aren’t aimed at them.

But the two child-no-e-mail laws in existence are so vaguely written they could be applied to any seller of goods or services illegal for kids to buy—automobiles and cell phone contracts, for example.

In a nation of fiscally intelligent government, this would be the last time child-protection no-e-mail registries would be covered here and no one reading this would need to be concerned with them.

This isn’t a nation of fiscally intelligent government.