New Law: Auctioneer School For Ebayers?

All around the United States, state regulators are increasingly miffed at the revenue loss due to eBay auctioneers' insistence they don't need to go to auctioneer school to peddle their (or somebody else's) wares online. Every few months, another state says enough is enough and the various Sheriffs of Nottingham want their cuts. The news has been hitting the wire since 1999 when New Hampshire became the first US state to send notice to online auctioneers that in order to avoid fines and state charges, they would have to acquire an auctioneer license. The path to becoming a state-certified auctioneer usually involves attending a special school complete with high-speed auction-ese vocal training, passing exams, paying a fee of $200 or more, setting up an escrow/trust account, and securing expensive bonds. Since then, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, and North Dakota have all looked into this online auction thing and have begun sending their own notices. While the laws in these states exclude anyone who is selling personal items, or even retail items, the state-created definitions of auctioneer (an entity for whom the regulations were created) are certainly limited. Illinois' Notice the definition makes no differentiation between "live" auctioneers or "online" auctioneers, and hence state governments are now free move about the citizen checkbook. Online auctioneers are balking at the regulations, wondering what fast-talking abilities have to do with online auctions. This is just the latest example of governmental sluggishness in adopting/addressing the differences between e-business and brick-and-mortar business. Google's latest Jeanne Morris. "The board had made an attempt to take on eBay and see if we could get people who were selling things online in the state of New Hampshire to get an auctioneer's license. We just found the business is so huge and there's so many people involved, we're just not equipped to enforce the law. We can't be on top of everyone selling online," Morris quotes New Hampshire chairman of the state Board of Auctioneers, Evelyn Lamprey, as saying. EBay spokesman