NetChoice Sues Georgia Over Its Unconstitutional INFORM Act in First-of-Its-Kind Complaint

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: PRESS@NETCHOICE.ORG

ATLANTA—Today, NetChoice sued Georgia in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia to halt Act 564, a law passed that penalizes marketplaces, disregards federal law and imposes burdens on lawful business and speech while completely failing to address the problem at hand—organized retail crime. 

“If this law goes into effect, it will create regulatory chaos, benefit particular market incumbents at the expense of competition and the free market, and squash free expression,” said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “Unfortunately, Act 564 does nothing to address the underlying issue at hand—ensuring law enforcement has the necessary resources to put retail thieves in jail. 

Marchese continued: “Instead, state policymakers have inadvertently hurt small, online businesses and chilled lawful commercial speech, leaving Georgians and their businesses in the dust to suffer at the hands of bad actors and limited, lower-quality services. NetChoice is suing today to ensure this short-sighted law is halted.”

By amending its own version of the “INFORM ACT,” Georgia is attempting to usurp Congress’s authority  to prevent a 50-state patchwork from emerging. Georgia’s law does just that in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. 

If it goes into effect, Act 564 will hurt small businesses and put them at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the nation while failing to curb the real problem at hand—organized retail crime. It redirects focus away from stopping organized retail criminals to imposing burdensome regulations on small online sellers, and it violates the First Amendment by restricting the ability of sellers to curate and disseminate lawful speech and buyers to receive it.

Tech is not the police—only law enforcement can put people in prison for crimes. Rather than creating a mechanism to extract money and resources from businesses and discouraging investment, job creation and innovation in Georgia, the State should have focused on giving investigators the tools they need to put these criminals behind bars.

The top takeaways of NetChoice v. Carr:

1. Georgia’s INFORM Act amendments fail to address organized retail crime. Instead, they penalize marketplaces and impose burdens on lawful business and speech. 
2. 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
3. If Georgia succeeds, it will eviscerate the national framework Congress sought to create, and a patchwork system for regulating online marketplaces will emerge once again.  
4. Act 564 violates the First Amendment by restricting the ability of sellers to disseminate lawful speech and buyers to receive it. It also violates platforms’ right over editorial discretion. 
5. Act 564 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. 
6. Act 564 does nothing to address the underlying issue—ensuring law enforcement has the necessary resources to put retail thieves in jail. Instead, it hurts small, online businesses. 

You can find our official complaint here, our request for a preliminary injunction here and a web page detailing our resources for NetChoice v. Carr here. 

For inquiries, please contact Krista Chavez at press@netchoice.org.