the body of the proposed law:
"(a) Conduct prohibited.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—It shall be unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label."
where to even start with how bad this would be.
thanks for the heads up from Anne Mitchell
Mike
You're welcome, and..yeah. For our article explaining it in plain English, and also saying exactly what to do to defeat it (really hoping to see the sponsors and committee chairs (it's already in committee) deluged with letters in opposition), see here:
Anne
So instead of applying a label, just drop the email outright.
-Dan
It appears that Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> said:
-=-=-=-=-=-
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/4409/text?r=9&s=1
the body of the proposed law:
This bill was filed by a bunch of the usual right wing suspects about
a month ago. It was referred to committee, like all filed bills, and
I very much doubt it will ever emerge.
The US congress is not a parliamentary system and even bills from
members of the majority party usually go nowhere.
R's,
John
I'm inclined to agree, except that as we've seen Google has already attempted to cave, which means that they (the bills' sponsors) will feel even more emboldened, and can point to Google's "pilot program" as evidence that "even Google admits there is a problem, so we need the law to make the other big providers do it."
I believe we can't rely on it being buried without a little help. It costs nothing to send an email to a representative, so..why not provide that help. ;~)
Anne
Leave the private matter of private email handling in the hands of the private participants of the private email system.
If congress wants to create a government mandate on political campaign emails, the political campaigns themselves ought to be forced to mark their emails as a political campaign emails. This would more easily allow sorting and filtering of emails by mail providers and by the users and help ensure easier reception or easier rejection by the users. I can say “yes, I want campaign emails” and I get less or no filtering or I can say “no, I do not want campaign emails” and never have to see them again .
I have contacted my reps and expressed my opinions and some relevant facts on this matter.
If heavily left leaning tech companies didn’t monkey with political content then they wouldn’t feel a need for such legislation.
-richey
Really? It's completely unworkable. What would even constitute "compliance"?
Mike
Likelihood of passage aside I wonder where they believe they get
jurisdiction for this? Put another way would it stand up in court?
Put yet another way if they have jurisdiction for this wouldn't they
basically have jurisdiction for just about anything like no more
letter 'W's on the internet? Granted they'd have to get it passed.
IANAL but it seems like it would have prior restraint problems.