If you have a newsletter, I hope you’re paying attention to these. I’m sure they’ll be challenged legally soon enough, but for now they spell trouble.

What’s the problem? These laws allow parents to sign up any email address their children have access to, and if you email them with anything that has any link to a page with information on something the child shouldn’t be accessing (information on alcohol, firearms, drugs, gambling or adult material) or even links on that page to such information, you’re breaking that law. It doesn’t matter if they double opted into your site, any email address on that list is forbidden for anyone sending such information. Financial topics such as mortgage and credit may also be impacted.

What can you do? No one is quite sure how to handle this one yet. If you think your list is at risk, you can purge your list every time against their list, but that will be time consuming and costly, as there is a charge for advertisers to access the list.

Now, one thing you will want to be aware of is that individuals can sue under these laws. Yes, they could sign up a forbidden email address then sue you for sending email to it. You’re the one who is supposed to know better than to send emails to it if your topic or ads on your pages are on the forbidden list.

No, CAN-SPAM doesn’t override this one, at least not until the courts say otherwise.

As a parent, I would also worry about the list being hacked. There are plenty of unethical marketers who will build a list any way they can. This list isn’t just about email addresses either. It will have cell phone and other contact information on children.

Utah seems to be going pretty strongly on the idea of protecting children from all offensive content on the internet. They’re being sued by the ACLU because they are trying to create a registry of offensive websites, which could be construed as blocking interstate commerce. ISPs would be required to block listed sites at the request of parents.

Now, I understand parents don’t want their kids seeing offensive material, but I really think it’s up to the parents to take control of how their children use the internet. By these rules, any site with even a little inappropriate material, say, books on the wrong topic, could be blocked, even though the site overall is not offensive. I don’t know how they expected to handle websites from outside Utah, since the law requires that content providers rate their content and submit to the registry. Who outside of Utah would know to do this? How difficult would it be to keep up with dozens of states doing this?

Realistically, I think that these are things that need to be national laws if they are to be laws at all, and probably aren’t appropriate for the government to handle anyhow. It’s too easy to fall into censorship when you get into this ground. Since the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, individual state laws are simply impratical, so national laws are the nearest to making sense.