If one U.S. Senator has his way, the Internet would be immune from already controversial campaign finance laws that critics fear could limit freewheeling political discourse in cyberspace.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) introduced a bill March 21 that would all but overturn a federal judge’s 2004 ruling that threatened to bring the Internet under the rules of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.
That law, which bans non-partisan, issue-oriented groups from criticizing politicians close to elections, was also feared to be leading to regulating the Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular, particularly after federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly refuted a Federal Elections Commission ruling that McCain-Feingold did not clearly cover the Net.
"To permit an entire class of political communications to be completely unregulated, irrespective of the level of coordination between the communication's publisher and a political party or federal candidate, would permit an evasion of campaign finance laws," Kollar-Kotelly wrote in 2004, in her order that the FEC revise its rules.
Reid’s bill would overturn the Kollar-Kotelly ruling and say the Internet is not included in definitions of what McCain-Feingold regulates. "Regulation of the Internet at this time would blunt its tremendous potential, discourage broad political involvement in our nation and diminish our representative democracy," the senator said in an e-mail message. "We should avoid silencing this new and important form of political speech."
The Kollar-Kotelly ruling became particularly nettlesome recently when a Republican on the FEC, Bradley Smith, warned that online activities like hyper-linking or forwarding campaign press releases by Websites could be regulated in the near future. "If someone else doesn't take action, for instance in Congress,” Smith said earlier this year, “we're running a real possibility of serious Internet regulation."
Reid’s bill could be seen as a disagreement within his own party: the three Democrats on the FEC refused to join three Republicans in appealing the Kollar-Kotelly ruling.
The FEC is expected to review the issue March 24, including the question of whether bloggers qualify as journalists and whether Web publishes must disclose any relationships they have with political campaigns, including whether posting press releases or links to certain campaign or political Websites equal campaign donations.
One group of bloggers and political activists, the Online Coalition, has begun a petition to the FEC, saying that throttling the blogosphere and other Web publications “will dampen the impact of new voices in the political process.” That, say many critics of McCain-Feingold, is exactly what Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) had in mind when he helped launch and pushed for the passage of that bill in the first place.
“During the Keating Five scandal, McCain was suspected of trying to keep himself in office by doing a favor for a campaign donor. Chastened by this experience, he is now trying to keep himself and his colleagues in office by silencing potential critics. In Washington this is considered progress,” wrote syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum earlier this month.
