Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FEC May Regulate Online Political Activity

Posted by timothy on from the hard-to-regulate-some-but-not-more dept.

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..."

1 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Silly rabbit, Trix are for... by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just got a note from my neighborhood association stating that, while the neighborhood covenant specifically prohibits them, the Supreme Court has ruled that signs for political candidates are protected speech and cannot be overruled by neighborhood agreements (contractual or not).

    If they're going to regulate political speech from candidates, that's one thing. That's not regulation of the Internet, but regulation of campaigns no matter where they are executed. Regulating political speech on the Internet for the regular user won't happen - not likely in theory and definitely not in reality.