Ryan Sager expresses annoyance over the FEC's recently announced plans to apply the McCain-Feingold joke to the web, including, yes, those innocuous little half-rodents of publication called "blogs". I quote Sager at length:
McCain-Feingold didn't require regulation of the Internet, so the FEC gave it a blanket exemption. But the reform lobby decided that since the law didn't forbid regulation of the Internet, a lawsuit could force the FEC's hand.
The lawsuit was ostensibly filed by Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) — the House sponsors of the McCain-Feingold law. But as Cleta Mitchell (a Republican campaign-finance lawyer with the firm Foley & Lardner) points out, the real plaintiffs were the reform lobbyists.
The lawyers for Shays and Meehan are Fred Wertheimer and Donald Simon. Representing McCain and Feingold in an amicus brief is Trevor Potter.
Wertheimer, Simon and Potter are, respectively, president of Democracy 21, former general counsel of Common Cause and president of the Campaign Legal Center — the same groups whose "nibbling" tactics Treglia explained on that tape.
The FEC's draft regulations, published last week, would set the following rules for the Internet:
* Online banner and pop-up ads would face the same limits as any other advertising.
* The "media exemption" from McCain-Feingold would be extended to some online news and commentary sites (such as Slate, Salon and the Drudge Report) — though not necessarily to bloggers.
* Individual, uncompensated online commentators could only conduct election-related activities from personal or publicly available (library, Internet café) computers. Use of an employer-supplied computer could violate the law.
Now, these rules aren't so innocuous to begin with. Any regulation of blogs opens up a large class of small-time political commentators — without access to The New York Times' legal team — to frivolous complaints and endless harassment by way of the FEC. And you can be sure it will be the most successful bloggers, those doing the most to sway public opinion for or against candidates, who will be targeted.
But the problems will only grow once the mice get started with their nibbling.
For now, the definition of an "advertisement" is fairly limited. But it could be expanded at the FEC's whim — or by court order.
For now, the media exemption will protect some Web sites. But remember the case of Sinclair Broadcast Group? It wanted to air a documentary critical of Sen. John Kerry and was immediately accused of making an "in kind" contribution to President Bush. The Democratic Party complained to the FEC that this shouldn't fall under the media exemption, and Sinclair had to alter its plans.
And for now, uncompensated bloggers can forward information from campaigns they support without getting in trouble for "coordinating." But the campaign-finance lobby has relentlessly tried to expand the definition of coordination when it comes to off-line activities, and can be trusted to do the same for online politics.
