Utah's Third Attempt To Regulate Keywords Fails 68
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."
Wow... (Score:1, Insightful)
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They get those cush jobs with all the benefits, then feel compelled to DO something, anything...
It sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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But that's what government is for - to regulate. 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?
Of course I have to wonder -
- if Bush-era deregulation is the cause of the U.S. market woes, then why is the European Union, the world's
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Hm.. I suppose Google, Yahoo, etc, could decide to ignore their keyword regulations and refrain from doing business in the state of Utah.
This would mean they endeavor to remove sites based in Utah from their index.
And they endeavor to block PCs whose geographic location is the state of Utah from buying/selling AdSense ads, and accessing their search, and other advertising-funded services.
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Why can't it be undone? Don't new laws get written all the time that undo or modify old laws?
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LOLUTAH! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure they'll eventually try something even dumber...like legislating that Pluto is a planet...
Like...here...in Illinois...
DOH!
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How would they enforce this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You'd think that's how it works, that they can't nab people for stuff on the internet... Talk to Mr. Max Hardcore about that.
Nothing to do with Law (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Government prevents the few from harming the many (Score:2, Insightful)
"if Bush-era deregulation is the cause of the U.S. market woes, then why is the European Union, the world's most stringently-regulated capitalist "country", in recession too?"
What you are missing through your fog of suspect thought patterns is that European financial problems, as well as those of Asia and most of the rest of the world, were the direct result of American (US) lack of regulation and the interconnected nature of the current global economic system. To put it country simple, it only takes ONE AP
Government prevents the few from harming the ma (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I'm 98% in cash (including gold) and have been since your hero Idiot II lowered the tax rate on capital gains. No, I am not an idiot (except for the time I bet on the Bank of England against George Soros).
No, I don't want the "markets to be fair with the rest of the world." I want the criminal types who cost the American people billions of dollars to be locked up in prison along with the guys who stole $200 from a bleeping liquor store. Life may not be fair, but the G-D D-NED legal system that reg
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Mr Franklin? Sir? Can we play on your lawn?
--the kidz
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As long as you don't tromp on my strawberries.
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Although that is the accepted explanation, by no means is it complete. There was an en
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[Nice mod of Marvin Kitman's old motto]
There have always been bubbles. Check out "tulipomania" on the web if you doubt this. The difference here is that the extent of the damage is much wider and that wider extent is a direct result of who knows how many hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial derivatives being traded off of any regulated exchange. Though you may be right in general about more unenforced regulations, in this particular case this global financial meltdown is a direct result of lack of
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However, what de-regulation and free-market theory fails to address is human nature, and corruption in the short term. Free market normalization is not a fast process. It is very easy for the selfishness of a few, the willingness of a few to game
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
In short (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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A great book about it: The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy [amazon.com].
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Sometimes regulation is a good thing.
And sometimes regulation causes major economic failures. Like the one we're dealing with now.
See, the risk of market regulation is that it gives people a false sense of security. And that's *exactly* what happened with the sub-prime mortgage securities. They were based on models that were so complex regulators couldn't understand them, so the regulators contracted out the analysis to basically the same bunch of investment banks that were pushing them. But hardly anybody *buying* the securities realize
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I think the point is regulation is only as good as the regulators. If the regulators aren't worth their salt, then regulation won't do jack. If we aren't going to regulate properly, then there isn't much point talking about how "deregulation is bad", or "we need more regulation"
Re:But that's what government is for - to regulate (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>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.
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The wider question is why people were looking to take out mortgages and other types of household credit in the first place. A bit of spend on some reasonable social housing so those that couldn't really afford it didn't need to turn to the credit system for a decent place to live would have been much cheaper than the bailout.
There were some other structural issues. The so called "death" of monetarism people called because the money supply was rapidly growing and inflation was staying low may have been pre
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>>>why people were looking to take out mortgages and other types of household credit in the first place.
Because the government-owned schools taught us to buy-buy-buy even if we had to go deep into debt to get our shiny-new toys (yes that includes shiny-new houses). The solution is for schools to teach people to say no, and save money first, and then pay cash.
>>>A bit of spend on some reasonable social housing
Sorry but I'm not working my ass off to buy somebody else a house. That's a viol
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>>>why people were looking to take out mortgages and other types of household credit in the first place.
Because the government-owned schools taught us to buy-buy-buy even if we had to go deep into debt to get our shiny-new toys (yes that includes shiny-new houses). The solution is for schools to teach people to say no, and save money first, and then pay cash.
>>>A bit of spend on some reasonable social housing
Sorry but I'm not working my ass off to buy somebody else a house. That's a violation of my rights and theft of labor. Let those persons save their own money to buy a small $40,000 starter home. Or rent, like I did when I first started.
No, instead you're working your ass off to pay for the collapse of the financial system. Personally I'd rather chip in a bit to make sure everyone in my neighborhood has decent accomodation.
As for the theft of labour argument, hahaha, what are you? A Marxist? Cause that's exactly what Marx says your boss is doing. The big wake up call from the current crisis is that you're going to be taxed regardless. So, you can vote for your taxes to pay for bombs and bailouts, or houses and hospitals....
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>>>companies only have one obligation and that is to make a profit.
An easy fix is to outlaw corporations, such that companies are owned by an individual (or group) and those individuals are directly responsible for all acts. Such a company would still want profit, but they'd also have other motives like following the golden rule (treat others like you want to be treated) and a desire not to be prosecuted for manslaughter if a car blows-up (desire to make safe cars), and so on.
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>>>it DID start under Clinton when he pressured Fannie/Freddie to loosen lending requirements to let more people borrow.
What good are regulations if a single man (clinton) or group (democrats in congress) can throw-out the regulations so easily? Perhaps the real flaw is we rely too much on government, especially when that government is directly responsible for the bubble.
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Why undermine your point with name calling?
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The free market works just fine, you need regulation to *have* a free market though. The banks collapsed because no regulation meant no information about the assets being sold, and people who got adjustable rate mortgages weren't told that the banks would jack the interest rates up so high that the mortgage payments doubled.
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>>>you need regulation to *have* a free market though.
Nonsense. Even in the total absence of government, a market will exist as people trade goods for goods, or gold/silver for goods. In fact one of the best "booms" of recent history was in the early and late 1800s, when the U.S. government took a hands-off policy of non-interference.
Who is pushing for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?)
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No, I think it's something specifically about the state of Utah. I mean, this is the only state in the Union that has a virtual state religion. A religion with such power over civil society that you can literally be arrested for smoking on the sidewalk outside of the Mormon Temple. That they would try to protect their own homegrown businesses from competition from the outside world is not surprising.
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No, I think it's something specifically about the state of Utah. I mean, this is the only state in the Union that has a virtual state religion.
True, but that has nothing to do with this.
A religion with such power over civil society that you can literally be arrested for smoking on the sidewalk outside of the Mormon Temple.
Umm, you can be cited (not arrested) for smoking on any private property that posts "no smoking" signs. If when cited you refuse to stop smoking, then you can be arrested for disobeying lawful orders from police officers. The temple gets no special treatment in this regard. The area you're talking about is not a public sidewalk. There are public sidewalks next to the temple, and you can smoke on there. The area you're talking about is the private property betw
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sidewalks in canada are not private property.
sucks to be utah.
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RTFA:
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.
It might be interesting to see where this outfit ended up in a bidding war for some keywords. I'm guessing its a case of sour grapes.
Utah? Can we replace your star? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You forgot Mittens Helmet-hair.
As for trading--I'd rather see all those itsy bitsy western states with one or two representatives and two d--ned senators merged into one big state of El Diablo with two senators and as many representatives as they can actually justify by their real population. They could even paint it permanently blue if they wanted. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
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We'd call the result Alaska, except it's the wrong color. Must have been a mixup at the dye factory or something.
Someone better fix it, quick, or Palin's head will continue to expand until she really can see Russia from her house.
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I'd rather see all those itsy bitsy western states with one or two representatives and two d--ned senators merged into one big state of El Diablo with two senators and as many representatives as they can actually justify by their real population.
Utah has three representatives, fully justified by the population. In fact, Utah will be the next state to get another representative, because the population is right on the edge of justifying a fourth. At the moment, Utah's populace is the most poorly-represented in Congress in the country (numerically).
Actually, you may be interested to know that Utah originally proposed state boundaries that would have included much of the area you suggest for "El Diablo". It would have been called "Deseret", but it
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>>>I'd rather see all those itsy bitsy western states with one or two representatives and two d--ned senators merged into one big state of El Diablo
Bad idea. However, seeing California subdivided into North and South California would be cool (similar to how Virginia State and Dakota Territory were divided in two). No one state should have 21% of the electoral college needed to become president. That's simply too much power to be held by a single government.
Also while we're at it, let's eliminate
Texas? Can we replace your star? (Score:2)
Hey, Carlos Norris wants to be the president of Texas. I say, let him have it. And then watch the Mexican drug lords eat his lunch for him without federal troops from Washington.
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Hey, Carlos Norris wants to be the president of Texas. I say, let him have it. And then watch the Mexican drug lords eat his lunch for him without federal troops from Washington.
Because Texas wouldn't have any troops of it's own [state.tx.us] would they?
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Call her what she is please (Score:1)
Re:Call her what she is please (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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All Democrat and all Republican politicians are bad people, and I do mean ALL. You know who is a good person? Someone who wants to vote out EVERY incumbent in every position in every level of government in the entire country, those crooks, liars, and cheats, and replace them ALL with people who are self-employed or small business owners or managers from middle America. Why business owners or managers? You need the management experience and business sense or you can't be expected to run a country. Why small
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When Bush announced withdrawing soldiers from Iraq by 2010, the TV media barely cared.
When Obama announced the same thing, the TV media was so cheerful I thought they were going to break-out in song..... and conveniently ignored the fact that 50,000 soldiers would still be there.
There is bias. TV reporters are almost all Democrats and it colors their reports.
how it happened (Score:1, Funny)
The following cryptic phone messages were left for key voters in the Utah Senate:
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