Campaign Financing Cyber Loophole

goombah99 writes "The Washington Post is criticizing a little-noticed bill wending it's way through congress that would allow unlimited and unreported campaign contributions by corporations and individuals as long as it was confined to internet advertising and publicity buys. While internet spending was only $14 million last year it is growing at a rate of 30 fold over four years poising it to overtake conventional media spending."

Comments

Re:Nooooo......

[ScentCone]

Now all of Europe's going to be completely overwhelmed with advertisements for political parties they cannot even vote for.

Actually, if you think the porn industry is a driver for technological advances, that's nothing compared to campaigning, at least when it comes to demo/geo-graphics. Have you bumped into any porn/dating-system ads that appear to pretty effectively map your ip address to your locality ("Find someone in Smallville to sleep with tonight!")? I believe that political campaigns will use everything at their disposal to make sure that their banners are being displayed where (and to whom) they think it will make the most sense.

Those gratuitous "Do you think John Kerry was lying?" or "Do you trust George Bush?" banners as seen on Drudge or elsewhere have nothing to do with real campaigns, and are entirely bait to get people to visit some cheesy "survey" site that attempts to purchase your soul for permission-based adware installs and other shenanigans. They just know that "Is global warming real? Vote!" is a tease that many people cannot resist.

Yes, I know that most AOL users will appear to be coming from Virginia, but most broadband users are reasonably easy to pin down in terms of state. Certainly it's pretty easy to tell when a visitor is from Europe, and to just rotate in an ad for a Vespa or something.