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Posted 06/6/2024  |  NetChoice Cases

NetChoice v. Carr (Georgia)

Chris Marchese
Litigation Center Director
Key Takeaways:
  • If it ultimately goes into effect, Act 564 will hurt online marketplaces, disproportionately impacting small businesses and putting them at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the nation, while failing to curb the real problem at hand—organized retail crime.
What's At Stake
  • Georgia’s INFORM Act amendments fail to address organized retail crime. Instead, they penalize marketplaces and impose burdens on lawful business and speech. 
  • Georgia is attempting to exercise authority that Congress took for itself when it passed the federal INFORM Act last year, a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
  • 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.  
  • 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. 
  • 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. 
  • 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. This law must be halted.
Case Brief

Case Status: Complaint and Preliminary Injunction Filed

Latest Update: June 6, 2024

Attorneys:

  • James Xi
  • Joe DeMott
  • Erin Murphy
  • Paul Clement


Firms:
Clement Murphy

Timeline

NetChoice sued Georgia in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia to halt Act 564 on June 6, 2024. No other state has implemented a similar law after Congress implemented its own federal INFORM Act in 2023 with the intent to stop a state patchwork from emerging.

Georgia’s amended Act 564 is an overreach that contradicts federal law, imposes unreasonable burdens on businesses, creates uncertainty, and fails to effectively tackle the intended problem of retail crime. It neither provides law enforcement nor marketplaces with resources to detect or prevent retail crime, nor does it give them the necessary resources to put retail thieves in jail. 

In NetChoice’s press release when the lawsuit was filed, Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation, said: “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.”

Read NetChoice’s initial complaint, filed June 6, 2024, here.

Our Team

Chris Marchese – Litigation Center Director

Link to bio

Paul Taske – Associate Director of Litigation

Link to Bio

Carl Szabo – Vice President & General Counsel

Link to bio

NetChoice Complaint, filed June 6, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

NetChoice Motion for a Preliminary Injunction, filed June 6, 2024, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.


Case Resources

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