Bruce Kobayashi and Larry Ribstein photo: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/950-19/larry-ribstein-bruce-kobayashi.html Their paper, A State Recipe for Cookies: State Regulation of Consumer Marketing Information: http://www.federalismproject.org/conlaw/ecommerce/cookies.html ********* http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41511,00.html Should States Regulate Privacy? by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Feb. 1, 2001 PST ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Larry Ribstein and Bruce Kobayashi are nothing if not ambitious: They hope to reshape the way Washington thinks about privacy. Even though many observers of Capitol Hill assume the new Congress will approve regulations aimed at Internet firms, the two George Mason University law professors are betting that legislators can be persuaded to try a more laissez-faire approach. Instead of the Senate and the House enacting laws, they argue in a paper published this week, state legislatures should be making the decisions. Says Ribstein: "Federal law hasn't turned out to be a salvation in other areas." Their efforts are part of a nascent -- although fast-growing -- effort by conservatives and libertarians to target online privacy laws using many of the same tools, strategies, and alliances they've used to battle federal environmental, education, and gun regulations in the past. On Tuesday, the American Enterprise Institute's Federalism Project convened an invitation-only roundtable where Kobayashi and Ribstein presented their paper to an influential audience that included former OECD ambassador David Aaron, Yale law professor Roberta Romano, Michael Quaranta of Experian, and Bill Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute. AEI's Federalism Project argues that the U.S. national government is an institution that has usurped powers not delegated to it in the Constitution -- those powers should rightfully be reserved for states. One 1995 case is a favorite: U.S. v. Lopez, in which the Supreme Court overturned a federal gun law by ruling it "exceeds Congress' Commerce Clause authority." [...] Their 43-page paper says: "Federal law would perversely lock in a single regulatory framework while Internet technology is still rapidly evolving. State law, by contrast, emerges from 51 laboratories (50 states, plus the District of Columbia) and therefore presents a more decentralized model that fits the evolving nature of the Internet." They predict that some states will impose more regulations than others -- by, for example, trying different approaches to mandating disclosure of privacy practices. [...]