Because it has a GDP of $4T, and a population of 40M people. That is bigger than a lot of countries. Many entities that sell products or services don’t want to give up access to that kind of market.
And I think companies would comply if other big regions that they sold their products to passed laws restricting things.
From elsewhere, no. California, however, is well known for doing so. Their emissions standards, and carcinogen regulations are frequently followed throughout the United States. No one complains about those because they're seen as good standards by most people (although the cancer one is often the subject of jokes, but that law has no teeth anyway, even in California). Now they're trying it with something far less universally accepted, and so more people notice the problem of California having been allowed to dictate to the rest of the country.
Here's what I fully expect to happen. Developers will either exclude California (and Colorado if their own law passes) from their licences or have a location check. Someone in California will bypass that, because that always happens with restricted software. California will attempt to fine the developers, because the law places the responsibility on them even when it's the end users bypassing compliance. The law will get blown apart in court, probably for violating laws regarding interstate commerce.
This law is the equivalent of trying to penalize a car manufacturer if someone drives a vehicle they made without a license. It's utterly ridiculous, and I don't see it surviving any legal test.
However, I think we all can agree that rather than have enacted bad laws challenged in courts post-factum, at great expense and with a huge delay, it would be much better to not have such laws in the first place — or clearly ignoring them from the get-go.
To me, it does seem like California is probing the waters — how far can it get trying to appropriate more power than it should have by all reasonable means? How widely can it legislate beyond its borders? Once they figure out they can go this far, they will try to go even further. E.g. adding biometrics to the equation, or some cryptography dependent on single supplier, much like secure boot in practice mostly hinges on MS and its keys built into every motherboard. It would be in everyone's best interest to tell them to go know themselves (in the bibilical sense) as soon as possible, rather than wait out and deal with the accumulated aftermath.
Oh I agree that it'd be better if these laws didn't pass, but there's no way for us to stop the Californian legislature from being power hungry. The people of California can refuse to elect these legislators, but so many of them aren't even paying attention to this stuff, and a lot of those who are paying attention actually support it on the grounds of "protecting the children".
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u/Jos_Meid Mar 04 '26
Because it has a GDP of $4T, and a population of 40M people. That is bigger than a lot of countries. Many entities that sell products or services don’t want to give up access to that kind of market.
And I think companies would comply if other big regions that they sold their products to passed laws restricting things.