I'm an honest person, living in a certain country in this world.
At a given time, I decided to publish an online newsletter. Is this a crime?
Then I wanted as many people as possible to read and enjoy my work. So, I decided to distribute my newsletter free. Is this another crime?
Since I could not work completely for free (we need money to live, right?), I started to sell advertising space in my newsletter.
The things were going excellent when suddenly FTC issued its "Advertising & Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road".
"The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium. ... advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers." CORRECT!
"[...] In addition, claims must be substantiated." WHAT?
And the trouble came ...
"Third parties [...] also may be liable for [...] disseminating deceptive representations if they participate in the [...] distribution of the advertising, [...]."
WHAAAAT?
I don't know why, but it always seems that when something is going well, someone must come along and destroy everything. The same goes for Cyber Space.
Before the release of this FTC Act, I used to receive 2 or 3 unsolicited commercial messages per day. I don't know why,
but the first effect that I noticed was that I now receive ten times more unsolicited messages ...
Being a third party distributing advertising, the ezine publishers are responsible for substantiating all ad claims, prior to publication.
What does this mean?
That for every ad I sell at the fabulous price of 3 or 4 bucks (try to calculate what net profit I make!) I need to spend a lot of time (that's money) to conduct researches in order to see if the claim from the ad is not deceptive ...
I wonder when I will have time to write my articles? Of course, the quality of my newsletter will go down.
Please suppose that a certain person asks me to publish the following ad:
"Extremely nice house in Chicago. For sale. $500,000."
Now, I am supposed to say, "Mr. Seller, in addition to your payment of $4, I also need you to prove that the house is
yours, that the house is nice, that the house is in Chicago and that the house is worth that price." Thanks God the ad has only one single line :-)
If the house is small and ugly, then the ad would be deceptive.
Really, what do you think that seller will reply? He will most likely send me a message letting me know how stupid I am and asking for his money back.
How am I supposed to handle this?
A scanned photo received by email from the advertiser is not enough. It may not be the photo of his house! Maybe I should go to Chicago, to see the house myself! What is the problem, right? For getting the price of the ad ($4) I will need to spend a couple of hundreds of dollars, right? Great deal!
Would that make everyone happy? The seller would be happy because I didn't bother him with stupid questions. The FTC
would be happy ... But what about me?
Of course, as you may have guessed, my subscribers are from all over the world.
Now let's suppose, that all governments decide to OVER protect their consumers like FTC, and begin releasing their own rules and guidelines.
What will this mean?
That using the $200 I earn per month selling advertising in my small ezine, I have to employ an army of lawyers to teach me English Law, Chinese Law, and so on, in order to comply with every law. As I said before, I have subscribers from all over the world and they must be protected according to their government's rules.
Will I be able to comply with all these rules and guidelines?
Obviously not. I simply cannot do it because I'm a HUMAN BEING publishing a newsletter. I am not a corporation, dear friends from FTC!
I guess this means that I will break some laws ...
So what IS my crime anyway?
I just want to publish an online newsletter to be distributed FREE to everybody.
Daily are published thousands of online ezines. I am subscribed myself to many of them. NOBODY complies with the above mentioned FTC rules simply because as I proved ... they are not applicable.
I wonder why FTC is not trying to publish fair and applicable laws ... A law is good only if it's fair and applicable ...
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