FEC Extending Election Regulation to the Internet

m_d_j_00 writes "Cnet has a story about Federal Election Commission plans to extend election laws to the Internet." From the article: "In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. 'The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines' the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote." This may include regulation of bloggers and mailing lists linking to or forwarding campaign website URLs.

Comments

Oh, that's refreshing....

[cmowire]

Oh, that's refreshing.

I'm damn sick of getting spammed by candidates. Oh yeah, and pre-recorded messages on my answering machine.

The part that sucks the most is when both of the leadng candidates spam, which means that I can't use it as a way to simplify my voting decision process. :/

So they're saying.....

[ral315]

that every link I make is a contribution to a campaign? Where can you honestly draw the line? From what it looks like, this is a contribution.

Can you say "Selective Enforcement"?

[doublem]

I've read the article, and it sounds like the door is being opened to start treating links to a site as a financial contribution to a campaign. While this could be used to fight astroturf campaigns, the actual implications are staggering. This all boils down to how much a link can raise for a candidate, and assigning a dollar value to links. The secretary sending letters example is a good one, and outlines the kind of muddy waters this is marching into.

I don't see how this can work effectively. Marketing Driods have been trying to assign dollar values to links and impressions for ages to no avail.. I see this becoming a muddy mess of conflicting and inconsistent enforcement. The Internet just isn't in a state where this can be monitored and enforced effectively.

Look at how links impact search engine rankings. For example, the Google Bomb of linking "Miserable Failure" to The Shurb's biography. Would these links be considered a campaign contribution to Kerry in the last election? If so, what would their value be? Of the links on Slashdot, who would be responsible, the web site itself or the people who made the posts?

What if a BLOG gets flooded with BLOG SPAM linking to a political site, using terms like "How to Save Social Seurity" for the links? IS the BLOG admin responsible under these laws? The hosting provider? The person who made the posts or the person whose BLOG it is? None of this is addressed. All the discussion in the article seemed focused on the notion that the person whose web site has the link was the person who created the link and is authorized to create the link.

Ok, why??

[theVP]

The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines' the campaign finance law's purposes

Unless the campaigners have a ton of bloggers on staff that aren't asking for one damn dime, this should still be something that is costing them money. Website administration can still be a costly business. While people that aren't directly involved with the campaign aren't costing the politician any money by linking to their sites, the politician has to initially invest money to get the word out to such sites.

This feels far too much like a public squelch.

And, like I've seen posted already, what's to stop people from hosting their sites on servers based in other countries?

Besides all that, its arguable that the person that benefitted the most from the web this past election is the one that LOST. So how much of an impact is the web making, and what is it exactly undermining?

Flipping the Script

[Doc Ruby]

The FEC is addressing the conflict between sponsored publications and unlimited campaign contributions. When combined, they don't give the truth a chance, and money controls elections unopposed. So the FEC, complicit in the corrupt travesty American elections have become, regulates the press - websites - rather than regulate the campaigns. Obviously the FEC must ensure that money can't overwhelm debate with press saturation, especially on the less- accountable Internet. But their regulations should control their actual jurisdiction: political campaigns, their management and finance.

Re:Flipping the Script

[Doc Ruby]

Harry Truman 1948. Probably the best president of the 20th Century, started out a haberdasher. Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Carter: none attended anything like an Ivy League school, all were born poor and rural. Likewise, Clinton attended Yale on scholarship, and has never amassed any money. Of the past 56 years, of 14 elections, only 4 have elected a rich man, and 6 have elected an Ivy Leaguer. The last 3 of 5 have elected rich men (Bushes), and all 5 have elected Ivy Leaguers, so it may be a new trend. But it's mostly skewed by the Bushes, who perfectly exemplify your complaint.

Money offers a (great) degree of control. Money is always the biggest factor, but not the only one. For example, it's hard to see how any feasible amount of money could have defeated Carter in 1976. And Bush lost while outspending Clinton in 1992. I'm sure there are other examples from before my time. But this legislation, by controlling the press rather than the campaign, makes the campaign's finance more controlling of the election.

So......

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean the end of all search engines during an election ?
Or will they define what makes a link a contribution?
(which by law would mean that a search-engine can not have a political bias, which would make it biased since it would have to evaluate results, and would result in a restriction of free speech.)

I better give up thinking about it before I get a headache..

Incumbent Protection

[KiltedKnight]

A lot of these campaign reform and regulation laws are very subtly or rather blatantly designed to make it much easier for incumbents to get reelected.

They're trying to prevent a candidate's opponents... especially non-major party candidates... from having any kind of impact on their reelection.

By it's very definition, the first amendment protects political speech. It is fool hardy to believe that it is appropriate to prevent someone blogging from posting a link to a contribution site.

Tell that to Senators McCain and Feingold, and their attempted Incumbent Protection Act, er, Campaign Finance Reform. (Inability to talk about the incumbent's record within 60 days of the election.)

Should you not be allowed to dontate to whom you choose?

One would hope so.

What about Foreign web servers?

Unenforcable without permission from the owners of the web sites, the various national governments, etc.

Who is going to filter this?

Symantec? (Library filtering software they mentioned here a while back.) Some other company? Who knows. I would think this would be generally unenforcable from a legal standpoint... not that the government won't try.

If it is not filtered, then which one of the thousands of people will be fined, and how would the FCC draw the line on this.

Ooooo.... money... draw a line? Why? It's up to the people to stop this one.

My friends, welcome to another slippery slope.

It just seems like yet another speed-up point on the much larger slope we've been on for a long time.

Law could be used as a weapon!

[sbowles]

To me, the interesting aspect of the Regulation is that violations are enforced by adding the estimated level-of-effort/value to a particular candidate's campaign expenditures. If a candidate's expenditures are deemed to be too high, the campaign is fined.

Could a competing campaign (say pro-candidate A) purposely create content (i.e. blogs) that was pro-candidate B with the sole intent of effecting FEC fines that could hurt the target candidate/party's ability to run the current or future campaigns?

webpages, independent expenditures, links

[arbitraryaardvark]

This is not directed at spam. It is directed at webpages. Not so much those of candidates, but of independent organizations like moveon.org.
In a recent enforcement decision, wisconsin right to life was reprimanded for posting a link.
W RtL is a corporation, and the FEC decided this was a prohibited corporate contribution. www.fec.gov.
I'm concerned about that.
In 2000, I and 1200 other people wrote the FEC to ask them to keep hands off the internet, and they were doin somewhat ok with that, until this decision last fall in the Shays v FEC case.
They received another 1200 comments and are in the process of adopting regulations.
Shays is on appeal.
Amicus briefs supporting an unregulated internet would be welcome.
In 1992, when I saw John Gilmore hand Glenn Tenny a several hundred dollar contribution to his internet-based run for congress, I thought the internet would someday have a big impact on campaigns. In 1994, with the de-foley-8 america PAC, it did, but it was this last election cycle where the net became maybe more important than TV. Dean's fundraising and moveon.org and blogs were real players, and the usual suspects are calling for regulation and censorship.
Votelaw.org, electionlawblog.org and electionline are some good places to follow these issues. In contrast, ballots.blogspot.com, my election law blog, is not as good.
The fight against internet censorship has usually focused on smut and indecency. I've been trying, without success, to use political speech cases to make the same points.

Re:Blog crackdown? Like Iran?

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Do you have any better ideas for getting information out of suspected terrorists that is likely to work?

No, but that doesn't matter when -- by moral and legal measures -- you're not supposed to torture people. If you are arguing that torture is necessary, then you are arguing for breaking BOTH the moral and legal bases for the United States government system. So don't be coy; just admit you want Fascism.

If you want to play the "war" angle to support the idea of legalized torture, please realize that the US Congress did not declare war, it just authorized the President to conduct military operations. This is why no one is being prosecuted for sedition or treason -- a legal state of war simply doesn't exist right now. Therefore torture is still illegal, at the very least.

This is Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

There may even be a Slashdot story about this somewhere.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6239493/

FEC may regulate Web political activity
Agency considering whether to appeal court ruling

The Associated Press
Updated: 2:08 a.m. ET Oct. 18, 2004

WASHINGTON - With political fund raising, campaign advertising and organizing taking place in full swing over the Internet, it may just be a matter of time before the Federal Election Commission joins the action. Well, that time may be now.

A recent federal court ruling says the FEC must extend some of the nation's new campaign finance and spending limits to political activity on the Internet.

Long reluctant to step into online political activity, the agency is considering whether to appeal.

But vice chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said the Internet may prove to be an unavoidable area for the six-member commission, regardless of what happens with the ruling.

"I don't think anybody here wants to impede the free flow of information over the Internet," Weintraub said. "The question then is, where do you draw the line?"

Internet makes huge splash
This election season has been a groundbreaking one online, as interest groups, campaigns and political parties use Web sites and e-mail to advertise, organize volunteers, reach out to donors and collect information about voters.

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean made the most pronounced splash online when he stunned his rivals by raking in tens of millions of dollars through Web-a-thons, a far cheaper fund-raising method than traditional dinners and cocktail parties. And Internet message boards, known as blogs, have become as common a place for people to air their political views as talk shows and newspaper editorial pages.

The Internet also is where political players do what they can no longer do on television or radio.

The National Rifle Association, for example, has started an online newscast and talk show to air its views on presidential and congressional candidates. The Internet is exempt from a ban on the use of corporate money for radio and TV ads targeting federal candidates close to elections, part of the new campaign finance law that took effect this election cycle.

The November Fund, an anti-trial lawyer group partly funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is posting Internet ads criticizing Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, a North Carolina senator and former personal-injury lawyer.

The FEC exempted such ads from the law's ban on coordination between candidates and groups that raise or spend corporate money. Last month, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly struck down the coordination exemption, ruling that it "severely undermines" the law.

Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign watchdog group Democracy 21 and member of the legal team that successfully sued to overturn that and several other FEC rules interpreting the law, said campaign finance laws should apply to the Internet because substantial amounts of money are being spent on online at election time.

The laws may not always apply to the Internet as they would to other venues, Wertheimer said, "but by the same token the Internet cannot become a major avenue for evading and circumventing campaign finance laws on the grounds that people just want the Internet free from regulation of any kind."

Max Fose, a Republican Internet consultant who helped Arizona Sen. John McCain, a sponsor of the new campaign finance law, raise millions of dollars online for his 2000 presidential bid, is wary of the judge's ruling.

"Whenever there's something new and emerging and it's still developing, to place restrictions on it I think is going to hurt how political candidates and elected officials look to use the Internet, to not only be elected but look to get voters involved," Fose said.

Ugh...

[Phoenix Rising]

This is a huge morass, and might be the single straw that breaks the back of McCain-Finegold.

There are tons of collaborative political sites out there on both sides, who aren't associated with the parties or candidates yet strongly support their causes. They deserve the freedom they had through the 2004 elections.

And then there's the blogs like the pro-Thune blog in S.D., where the bloggers were paid for their blogging efforts by the campaign itself. They don't deserve crap under McC-F.

But the law doesn't distinguish - it only tries to gauge the value of an effort. How ugly can it get?