ATLANTA—Today, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia will hear NetChoice’s request to halt Act 564 while our lawsuit, NetChoice v. Carr, moves through the legal system.
The hearing begins at 2:00 PM Eastern Time.
“We hope the Court will ensure Georgians and their businesses are protected and halt this law while our case proceeds,” said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “Act 564 would create regulatory chaos for Georgia businesses, benefit particular market incumbents at the expense of competition and consumers, and constrain free expression, while doing nothing to actually stop organized retail criminals operating online.”
Act 564 is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2024.
By amending its own version of the “INFORM Act,” Act 564 ignores Congress, redirects focus away from stopping organized retail criminals to imposing burdensome regulations on small online sellers, and violates the First Amendment by unduly impeding sellers from curating and disseminating lawful speech and consumers from reviewing it.
Rather than extracting resources from Georgia businesses and discouraging investment, job creation and innovation in the Peach State, policymakers should have focused on giving law enforcement the tools they need to put organized retail criminals behind bars.
The top takeaways of NetChoice v. Carr:
- Act 564 fails to address organized retail crime, penalizes businesses and imposes burdens on lawful business and speech.
- Georgia is attempting to exercise authority that belongs to Congress, and that Congress exercised when it passed the federal INFORM Act last year, a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
- If Act 564 is upheld, it will eviscerate the national framework Congress sought to create, and a complex, convoluted patchwork for regulating online marketplaces will emerge once again.
- It violates the First Amendment by restricting the ability of sellers to disseminate lawful speech and buyers to receive that speech. It also violates platforms’ right over editorial discretion.
- It imposes a monitoring and censorship requirement on platforms to review all posts or face a significant liability for failure to remove content and sellers who refuse to submit the Act’s required documentation, violating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
- Act 564 does nothing to address the underlying issue, ensuring that law enforcement has the necessary resources to put retail thieves in jail. Georgians will suffer the most.
You can find NetChoice’s request for a preliminary injunction here and a web page detailing resources for NetChoice v. Carr here.
For inquiries, please contact Krista Chavez at press@netchoice.org.