Currently, many state legislatures are producing laws governing issues of online commerce and publication. Whether such laws are appropriate at a state level, and whether the laws are reasonable, has yet to be decided. What is important for you to know is that some of these laws set up restrictions and conditions that could adversely affect your operations.
Note that the situation is complicated by the reach of the Internet. If you set up operations in California, you can be charged with violation of laws in Georgia, and sued in Texas, all because the Internet reaches people in those states. Until the legal status of these issues is decided, this may cause you some headaches in the short term.
Here are some example issues to consider:
Many states, and some cities, levy sales taxes on goods and services if the transactions take place in their jurisdictions. Therefore, if you have customers using electronic commerce to make purchases from those places (or if you are doing business in one of those places), then you may be responsible for calculating and collecting the appropriate taxes.
Georgia passed a law in 1996 that makes it against the law to represent oneself on a computer system with an alias or pseudonym. This could be interpreted to cover most account names, and even some site names.
The same law in Georgia also makes it illegal to have a link on your web pages to other sites unless you have obtained the explicit permission of the site to which you have made the link! If that law stays on the books, imagine what it implies for your web page design and development.
Some large commercial entities have been seeking an expansion of copyright law that would result in protection for their ability to obtain copyrights for online collections of data. If changes such as they seek become law, once they collect together any data set, use of the data by others would be prohibited. This might include collections of sports statistics, stock listings, and other material currently considered to be in the public domain. One pundit speculated on the results if these changes were enacted—the first company to publish an online dictionary might be able to demand royalty payments from anyone who used words in their web pages!
Do some of these sound particularly silly to you? They probably should. Unfortunately, all are based in truth. Legislators are generally uninformed about how the Internet really works, about what web pages are, and about how people use the Internet. This is further complicated by the fact that we do not yet understand how all of the aspects of the rapid evolution of networking will affect existing (and often cherished) freedoms and institutions. The result has been an effort, often guided by special interests, to enact legislation to control perceived problems. The results have often been misguided and sometimes even damaging.
You need to be aware of these changes if you intend to operate a business on the Web. If you are only a user of the Web, these changes may affect you, too. The best defense for bad laws, however, is to become informed about what is being proposed. You might even want to become a proactive force for reasonable laws by seeking out your elected representatives and seeking to educate them as to how the Internet and Web really work.