The design goal of the CCA (Communications Consent Act) is to produce a legislative infrastructure which is equally at home in legal and technical spaces. The CCA needs to empower citizens to capture a “state of affairs” at a point in time, their configuration if you will, and express that both as a contract between parties and as a technical specification shared by each party’s systems. This approach stands in contrast to retro-active legislation such as the TCPA and the CAN-SPAM Act which reacted to technologies with little or no effect and at a significant cost. Moreover, the CCA is distinctly antagonistic to government regulation of the form favored by the TCPA, with detailed micro-management of voluminous conditions. Instead, the CCA provides a lean set of building blocks and balances restriction with facilitation, placing the management of rights and responsibilities in the hands of the citizens and using legislation only insofar as is required to so empower those citizens.
The CCA has three main concepts:
- Consent: Determines what is or is not allowed between two parties
- Preference: Determines best practices from the recipient’s point of view
- Delegation: Determines how to act if the recipient is incapacitated or unavailable
All three can be qualified with other information, and all relate communicating parties operating over channels. For example, Alice allows Bob to call or text or email after work. Alice prefers text over phone calls and email over text, and Alice delegates to Bob for work-related email when she is on vacation.
Critically, the CCA introduces no mandatory central authority that regulates communications. Instead, it facilitates a communication economy much as contract law facilitates commerce without creating a central authority for all contracts. Moreover, the CCA has very little impact, or can have very little impact, on the status quo except in cases where a citizen is harassed or assaulted by unwanted communications – in these cases the CCA provides the citizen with rights they never had previously – the right to demand to be left alone. However, due to the technical/legal parity of the CCA, as citizens grow to embrace and exercise greater control over their personal communications landscapes, the CCA provides a means of automating compliance in a market-friendly manner that both sparks competitive product development, but also maintains regulatory control in the hands of the citizens and keeps it out of the hands of the government.
The CCA, by articulating systems of contracts based on consent, preference, and delegation embraces the AI revolution and future forms of communication. CCA contracts can also be used to reframe existing legislation, such as the TCPA and CAN-SPAM act, bringing unity to an increasingly strained, costly, and complex system of legislation of dubious utility. The importance of removing government from any direct regulatory role can not be overstated, as legislation continually and reliably fails to adapt to changing technologies with the agility required to serve the public’s interest. As such, legislation must not be entrusted with a direct, critical role in regulating specific technologies or content, but rather, can only be entrusted with the task of empowering citizens to so regulate. The first step in this citizen empowerment is the legal recognition of consent, preference, and delegation.
A minimum goal, a first test of CCA, is to allow citizens to instruct message senders to cease and desist sending unwanted messages – something citizens do not yet have the right to do.