D-Day is March 16

The FEC has set March 16th as the date for a vote on FEC regulation of the Internet. The decision has been eagerly anticipated by the online political community.

I suspect what we’ll see is passage of regulations that exempt individual speech through a vehicle like blogs, but full reporting and disclosure of advertising run on the web, and payments to bloggers for consulting services, etc.

That’s the way it should be. No one is opposed to counting online advertising dollars. They should avoid any attempt to stifle discussion. That would be the net effect of forcing bloggers to report some or all of the cost of their site should they post a positive story. That would be unrealistic and terribly hard to enforce.

Share

Tags