NEW YORK (MarketingClick/Reuters) - A group of companies and industry organizations have quietly undertaken a campaign to stifle Internet-privacy legislation, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition Tuesday.
Led by the Online Privacy Alliance in Washington, the loosely organized campaign is attacking legislative proposals on three fronts: identifying expensive regulatory burdens, raising questions about how any U.S. Internet law would apply to non-Internet industries, and assuring lawmakers that privacy is best guarded by new technology, not new laws, the paper said.
Members of the Online Privacy Alliance include Microsoft Corp., AOL Time Warner Inc., International Business Machines Corp., AT&T Corp., BellSouth Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., the paper said.
These companies also have been working with the Direct Marketing Association, which is the largest trade association for direct-mail and marketing companies, as well as with others, the paper said.
The group Monday went public with four industry-funded studies asserting that privacy legislation would cost consumers billions of dollars annually, the paper said.
Its aim is to halt the advance of dozens of privacy bills in Congress and in state legislatures across the country, the paper said.
