Political free e-speech

POLITICAL FREE E- SPEECH
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Editorial Staff]
[Commentary] The Federal Election Commission voted to regulate bloggers this week. Oddly enough, bloggers at both ends of the political spectrum welcomed the FEC's move. That's because the effect of its new rules will mainly be on campaign committees, not on people who post their political musings online. The seeds for the rules were planted when Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law in 2002. Named after its Senate sponsors, John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), the measure was designed to prevent unlimited, undisclosed donations from influencing federal campaigns and to regulate groups that air political commercials late in a campaign. The FEC decided to regulate only paid political advertising online. Anyone who buys political ads on someone else's website will have to report the expenditures to the FEC, and the ads will have to name their sponsors. Online it's virtually impossible to advertise to a significant number of Web users in any community. The best a candidate can do is to buy ads on the most popular websites and hope that people in the district will stumble over them. More important, anyone who wants to publish his or her views online can do so. Unlike television and newspapers, there are no barriers to entry online. So if candidate Smith's backers say candidate Jones is a Bible-burning, soft-on-terrorism wacko, candidate Jones' allies can easily respond in kind on their own sites. Combine that with the blogosphere's penchant for ferreting out hidden agendas, and you have a far more effective regulatory force than the FEC could ever hope to apply.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-bloggers31mar31,1...
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