First-order effects

• Multistate online retailers must build state-by-state compliance — distinct consumer rights, opt-out mechanics, and effective dates per jurisdiction — instead of one national rulebook, raising fixed costs most heavily for smaller sellers.
• Virginia and Washington become template-setters: their statutory designs will be copied or amended by other legislatures, so the terms these two states settle on propagate beyond their borders.

Second-order effects

• With Congress deadlocked, tech industry groups pivot from seeking federal preemption to lobbying states like Utah for laws weaker than California's — an active campaign to shape the patchwork rather than end it — while Microsoft exports its own blueprint via privacy bills modeled on the twice-failed Washington Privacy Act in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, and Minnesota.
• Compliance vendors, consent-management tools, and legal services gain a durable market as every new state statute forces retailers to re-audit data flows and update disclosures.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, the US settles into a durable state-led regime: each legislative session adds statutes with different scopes, and the burden of reconciling them falls on operators — tilting e-commerce economics toward large platforms that can absorb multi-jurisdiction compliance.
• States also fill gaps Congress won't touch, as when Washington adopted the first sweeping consumer health-data safeguards covering location records — signaling an expanding definition of 'sensitive data' that multistate businesses must track continuously.