State Legislative Roundup for March 25, 2024
As state legislative sessions for 2024 grind on and some reach their end, we continue to provide our periodic roundup of bills under active consideration in the states that we are monitoring because they could have an impact on the ecommerce marketing landscape.
Illinois is considering House Bill 5566, which was introduced by Representative Matt Hanson (D – Springfield) and referred to the House Rules Committee on February 9, 2024 and then the House Committee on Consumer Protection on March 5, 2024. If adopted, the bill would amend Illinois’s Telephone Solicitation Act to make three key changes: (1) to prohibit a telemarketer from placing more than 3 calls to the same person during a 24-hour period; (2) prohibit intentionally altering the voice of the caller in an attempt to disguise or conceal the identity of the caller in order to: defraud or confuse the called party; and (3) to create a registration requirement for any person making telemarketing calls into Illinois.
Update as of March 25, 2024: No further action on the bill.
[NEW ADDITION: PASSED] Maine speedily passed House Bill 1433. The bill passed both chambers of the Maine legislature in just 22 days. Assuming the bill is signed by Governor Mills, the bill will require telephone solicitors to use the reassigned numbers database administered by the Federal Communications Commission to check to verify whether the telephone number has been assigned to a new user before initiating a telephone sales call. Under Maine’s Telephone Solicitation law, a “telephone sales call” is defined as “a solicitation call made to a consumer for: (1) Solicitation of a sale of consumer goods or services; or (2) Obtaining information that will or may be used for the direct solicitation of a sale of consumer goods or services or an extension of credit for such purposes.” Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 10, § 1499-B. Violation of this requirement can be enforced by the Attorney General with fines of up to $25,000, disgorgement of funds, and the payment of costs and attorney’s fees.
Maryland is considering House Bill 53, which has passed the House and is now pending in the Maryland Senate Finance Committee. HB 53 would establish a task force to investigate e-commerce businesses with more than $10 billion in annual revenue to evaluate whether they have a monopoly in the e-commerce industry and whether those platforms are engaged in unfair competition by creating and selling their own version of a product that is already sold by third-party vendors on the platform and by leveraging algorithms and other tools to give themselves an unfair advantage in selling their version of the product over the product offered by those third-parties. The bill was introduced by Delegate Chao Wu (D-Annapolis).
Update as of March 25, 2024: The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the bill on March 19, 2024.
Missouri is considering House Bill 2603 titled the "Caller ID Anti-Spoofing Act". Following a public hearing on the bill on February 13, 2020, the House Special Committee for Innovation and Technology voted to pass the bill on February 20, 2024. The bill would create the offense of caller identification spoofing as a class E felony. The bill provides that recipient of any call (which is defined to include any telephone call, facsimile, or text message) in which the caller uses false caller ID information with the intent to deceive, defraud, or mislead the recipient has standing to recover punitive damages against the caller in an amount up to $5,000 per call and that call recipients may pursue the claims as a class action. The bill does not specifically address its application to text messages, including those sent using a shortcode. The bill was introduced by Representative Mitch Boggs (R-LaRussell).
Update as of March 25, 2024: No further action on the bill.
New Jersey is considering Senate Bill 1237 and Assembly Bill 2635 which was already passed by the Senate with a vote of 37-0 on February 12, 2024, and is now pending before the New Jersey Assembly’s Consumer Affairs Committee. The bill relates to the transmission of caller ID information on telemarking calls and provides that “a telemarketer shall not fail to transmit or cause to be transmitted the telephone number and, when made available by the telemarketer’s telephone company, the name of the telemarketer, to any caller identification service” except that it is permissible to “substitute . . . the name . . . and the seller’s customer service telephone number that is answered during regular business hours.” The bill does not specifically address its application to text messages, including those sent using a shortcode. The Senate bill was sponsored by Senators James Beach (D-Burlington and Camden) and Nellie Pou (D-Bergen and Passaic) and the Assembly Bill was sponsored by Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Parsippany), Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-Chester), and Assemblywoman Tennille R. McCoy (D - Hamilton Square).
Update as of March 25, 2024: No further action on the bill.
[NEW ADDITION]: New York is considering Assembly Bill 8195, which was referred to the Science and Technology committee on January 3, 2024. The bill would provide for the Department of State in New York to have authority to regulate the use of artificial intelligence. The bill would declare that the use of AI to “psychologically profile individuals for the purpose of targeted advertising, behavioral prediction, or the manipulation of user experiences and interactions in products or services” constitutes a “high-risk advanced artificial intelligence system” and empower the Department of State to require licenses to be issued for the use of such systems. Operators of a “high-risk advanced artificial intelligence system” would be required to establish an ethics and risk management board of no less than 5 people to adopt rules governing the development and use of the AI system and to prepare a risk assessment and reporting to the Department about risk mitigation efforts. The bill would also provide for the Department to establishing cybersecurity standards and require the existence of automatic logging and internal controls.
Tennessee is considering House Bill 2504 and Senate Bill 2410 that, if adopted, would amend the Tennessee criminal code to make it a Class A misdemeanor for a debt collector or inbound telemarketer service to “knowingly cause any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information, including caller identification information that does not match the area code of the person or the debt collector or inbound telemarketer service the person is calling on behalf of, or that is not a toll-free phone number” with the “intent to induce the subscriber to answer.” The bill does not specifically define the “inbound telemarketer service” or address whether the prohibition would be applicable to text messages or specify if it applies to shortcodes. The bills are sponsored by Senator London Lamar (D-Nashville) and Representative Torrey Harris (D-Memphis).
Update as of March 25, 2024: In the House, HB 2504 has passed the Banking & Consumer Affairs Subcommittee, the Commerce Committee, and is on the calendar for a vote of the House today. In the Senate, the bill is on the Senate Judiciary Committee calendar for consideration on March 26, 2024.
West Virginia considered House Bill 5251 and Senate Bill 500, a West Virginia Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which sailed through the house passing 98-0 on February 9, 2024 before being referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Updated as of March 25, 2024: FAILED: As we reported earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to advance the bill before the end of the legislative session.
