Opinion: Florida Considers Following In California’s Regulatory Footsteps – By Andrew Wilford (Daily Caller) / March 4, 2022
Back in 2018, California passed a first-in-the-nation law to subject businesses with almost any sort of digital connection to the Golden State to burdensome online privacy regulations. Heavy-handed legislation with little concern for the impact on businesses and taxpayers is almost to be expected from California, but it’s disappointing to see Florida considering a similar measure.
After all, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was costly enough, with the state’s own attorney general estimating that the measure would cost California businesses alone $55 billion in upfront compliance costs, on top of $16.5 billion in costs over the next decade. The state didn’t even attempt to model the impact on the thousands of out-of-state businesses that transact with California consumers through the internet.
But even if it did manage to model those out-of-state compliance costs, it still wouldn’t tell the full story. Because aside from the merits of consumer privacy legislation, the underlying issue is that the CCPA’s impact went well beyond California’s borders — if other states decided to follow California’s lead, businesses and consumers risked being subjected to an increasingly confusing patchwork of state consumer privacy laws.
