As you may have heard, San Francisco recently passed a law requiring that cell phones must have labels telling consumers how much radiation they emit:
Imposing roughly the same cautionary standards for cellphones as for fatty food or sugary soda, [San Francisco] — never shy about its opinions — voted on Tuesday to require all retailers to display the amount of radiation each phone emits.
...
Under the law, retailers will be required to post materials — in at least 11-point type — next to phones, listing their specific absorption rate, which is the amount of radio waves absorbed into the cellphone user’s body tissue. These so-called SAR rates can vary from phone to phone, but all phones sold in the United States must have a SAR rate no greater than 1.6 watts per kilogram, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the $190 billion wireless industry.
A domestic lawsuit has been filed by the Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) against the law:
the Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) just filed a complaint in federal district court, claiming the new law supersedes the FCC's authority to regulate radio emissions and misleads consumers into believing some phones are safer than others.
I have no opinion on that lawsuit, but I do wonder if trade agreements might come into play if the lawsuit fails. If you look at the lists here, it appears that two Blackberry products are on the list of the ten worst phones for radiation, whereas none make the ten best list (a full list of all products is here). Blackberry is Canadian-owned, and thus perhaps there are some possibilities for arguments under trade agreements about de facto discrimination, necessity, lack of scientific basis, etc., which I'm sure lawyers somewhere are thinking about in more detail.
