Online Dating

The booming single population in the United States has spurred the rapid growth of the online dating industry, fostering intimate connections between individuals who may not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet. In the United States alone, Over 40 million Americans visit internet dating sites per month. For many subscribers, these services have resulted in beautiful courtships and long term commitments, developed safely between consenting adults. Incidents of fraud or assault have been both isolated and infrequent, offering no evidence to suggest that utilizing these services carries any increased risk of victimization.

However, special interest legislation, introduced by Texas-based True.com, an online dating company, is threatening to impose unnecessary and dangerous regulation on the industry. If enacted, the law would require online dating services to either conduct criminal/marital background checks on new subscribers or present its members with a safety disclaimer. Masked as a consumer safety initiative, True.com hopes to play on the fears of the public to gain an edge over market competition.

The Internet Alliance believes education and common sense, rather than unworkable laws and regulations, are the best way to protect consumers online. Several IA members offer online dating services. Each has safety provisions built into their service, offering a list of safe dating tips to new members and employing a review team that screens each profile submitted for suspicious criminal or fraudulent activity. The Internet Alliance feels that these steps are adequate to ensure the protection of its users and is strongly opposed to the passage of additional measures for the following reasons:

• The proposed legislation does nothing to actually increase safety of online dating. There are inherent risks involved in exploring any new interpersonal relationship. Even in long term commitments there is no ultimate guarantee of the safety, sanity, or sincerity of an individual’s actions or intentions. Each person has a unique screening process based upon personal standards and past experiences that cannot be rivaled by information found in a public registry. In fact, the Internet as a dating medium can arguably make the experience safer, as individuals have the opportunity to assess relationship potential well before a physical meeting occurs.
• The initiative unfairly targets online businesses. Unregulated dating services are not a new phenomenon, running smoothly for years without legislative interference. Newspaper ads and single’s hotlines are quite common and frequently used, providing even less information to interested parties about their potential date than is offered by a typical online profile. According to the standards imposed by True.com, these avenues should carry a greater risk of victimization than internet-based services, yet there have been no attempts regulate this facet of the industry.
• A criminal background screening does not ensure that the subscriber’s criminal history will be revealed. Mechanisms for tracking criminal convictions are handled at the state level. True.com currently operates under an exclusive contract with Rapsheets.com, a private firm that is attempting to build a national database. States provide this information voluntarily however, with many choosing not to participate, leaving True.com’s subscribers with an incomplete picture of an individual’s criminal history. In addition, the absence of a criminal record does not guarantee that a subscriber has not engaged in illegal activity. Finally, True.com offers no mechanisms to prevent users from establishing a false identity or profile. In light of these loopholes, the resulting mandated screening process would provide subscribers with a false sense of security, increasing their vulnerability to victimization rather than making their experience safer.
• Performing criminal and marital background checks walks the fine line of legislating morality. The existence of any felony charge automatically excludes an individual from contracting services, denying individual users the right to define their own standards of acceptability. An activity or behavior that is objectionable to one user may be insignificant to another. In addition, the legislative proposal references no timeframe after which previous convictions may become negligible in the eyes of a subscriber. The legislation also threatens to impose sanctions upon married subscribers. For the majority of Americans, infidelity is a moral, rather than legal issue, providing it with no reasonable place in a legal discussion of this nature.
• Introducing this legislation at the state-level will significantly increase the complexity of inter-state regulation. Subscribers routinely communicate and develop relationships with users across state lines. In light of this, enforcing the legal decisions of each state regarding online dating protocol is nearly impossible and makes little sense in terms of regulatory efficiency.
• The regulation of the online dating industry is unenforceable. The Internet is a vast, open, medium of communication that is extremely difficult to police. The legal definition of online dating itself is extremely vague, making compliance to systemic initiatives extremely difficult to achieve. Technically speaking, chat rooms and Instant Messaging conversations could be considered ‘online dating’ and subject to regulations that makes little sense
• All of the information obtained and offered by True.com is a product of public record. Any individual user seeking information regarding criminal history or marital status need only solicit the state in which a particular user resides. As a result, there is no need to place undue burden upon the online dating industry to provide information that is already widely available to the public through traditional avenues

The Internet Alliance believes that the regulation of online dating service providers would impose unnecessary burdens on the industry, failing to improve safety for subscribers. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the mandated screening process render the proposed system ineffective and unreliable. True.com, the company spearheading the special interest legislation, is simply seeking to manipulate the online dating industry to its advantage by destroying healthy market competition. It is important for state lawmakers to oppose the passage this legislation, and reaffirm our respect for the ability of individuals to make sound decisions regarding their safety and the validity of their personal reasoning.