When Attorneys General Talk About Email

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper answered a constituent's question about spam by stating that CAN-SPAM gives individuals a private right of action against spammers in federal court.¹ It does not, and the error is worth correcting on the record because it is still widely repeated.

Section 7706 of the Act sets out who may bring an action under CAN-SPAM. The list is specific: the Federal Trade Commission, other designated federal agencies, state attorneys general acting on behalf of state residents, and internet access service providers.² Individual consumers are not on that list. A private citizen who receives unwanted commercial email cannot sue the sender under CAN-SPAM, regardless of how many violations the message contains.

This is not some obscure technical point. It is the standing provision of the statute. That's the part that decides who gets to walk into court in the first place. An attorney general is precisely the official the Act empowers to bring suit on behalf of consumers who cannot bring it themselves. Getting that wrong in a public Q&A should be embarrassing.

The absence of a consumer private right of action does not mean consumers are without recourse — just that it's harder to come by. State attorneys general can and do bring CAN-SPAM enforcement actions. The FTC pursues enforcement independently. The federal statute's standing limitation is a jurisdictional boundary that determines who may file the case, not whether a case may be filed.