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FEC May Regulate Online Political Activity
jgarzik writes "A recent federal court ruling ordered the U.S. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to rewrite rules that currently exempt, rather than regulate, political ads and speech on the Internet. Well, it's looking more and more likely that the FEC will not be able to avoid some amount of Internet regulation. I always thought that freedom of speech originated in part because the framers wanted to protect political speech. I guess I was being naive..."
If the FEC is currently regulating radio, TV and print ads, it should do so for Internet. The regulation has to do with coordination between candidates and PACs as well as spending levels and sources. The first amendment was not meant to protect your right to say anything, anywhere, anytime, so yes, you are naive. Supreme Court justices of all political bents have ruled that their are limits. In this case, the FEC helps provide a level playing field to *protect* our democracy from people yielding undue influence based on the size of their pockets.
History has shown time and time again that it's hard to write laws and regulations to "level a playing field" without accdentally writing in exploitable loopholes. It's really the same sort of problem as the difficulty of writing secure software.
Attempts to do this may well backfire and amplify the power of those with deep pockets -- they will be in a much better position to afford the lawyer time to look for loopholes in the laws and regulations, use them, and then defend that use in court.
And as the regulations are incrementally patched to fix each loophole, they will increase in complexity, increasing the risks that the well-intentioned little guy will accidentally break them and end up muzzled.
There's no good answer here, alas.
I feel much better about regulations requiring a public audit trail of where the money came from and where it went, rather than attempting to create complex rules and "soft", "hard", etc., classes of money and donors.
"The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now." - Robert Anton Wilson
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I don't want George Soros or the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush to have more free speech than I do. I want them to have exactly the same amount, regardless of how much money they have or can gather. Simply because I get paid more than someone else does and can contribute more to someone's kitty for political ads doesn't mean that my views should be more widely disseminated.