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

Maybe not

[Kawahee]

I don't think that we're going to find billions dumped into internet advertising, why? Because internet campaigning isn't going to be growing at 30 fold forever.

Campaign 1: $.5 million invested online
Campaign 2: $15 million invested online.
That's 30 fold (and 14.5 million).
Campaign 1: $100 million invested, Campaign 2: $120 million invested.
That's 1.2 fold (and 20 million).

Nobody is going to target the internet with large amounts of money when it's more feasible to target the general public using television/newspaper ads. Nobody is going to say, "Hey! Look! I can donate $100 million in internet advertising" *when the money can be better utilitised somewhere else*.