A Federal Election Commission commissioner has suggested that Internet bloggers and news organizations might be getting a federal byte in the butt if they “improperly” link to political campaign Websites.
FEC commissioner Bradley Smith—who tried unsuccessfully to help thwart the controverail McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform’s Internet provisions—has told Internet journalist Declan McCullagh that because three Democrats on the FEC wouldn’t join himself and the other Republican on the panel in taking down the Net-tied sections, there was likely to come “a bizarre” regulatory process affecting Internet political expression.
“The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem?” Smith told McCullagh. “If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.
“Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front,” he continued. “Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?... The FEC did an advisory opinion in the late 1990s…that I don't think we'd hold to today, saying that if you owned a computer, you'd have to calculate what percentage of the computer cost and electricity went to political advocacy.”
Smith called that an “absurd” direction but one which a federal judge recently took, when overturning a 2002 FEC Internet exemption to McCain-Feingold last fall. "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" McCain-Feingold’s purposes, wrote U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
“The judge's decision is in no way limited to ads,” Smith told McCullagh. “She says that any coordinated activity over the Internet would need to be regulated, as a minimum. The problem with coordinated activity over the Internet is that it will strike, as a minimum, Internet reporting services.
“They're exempt from regulation only because of the press exemption,” he continued. “But people have been arguing that the Internet doesn't fit under the press exemption. It becomes a really complex issue that would strike deep into the heart of the Internet and the bloggers who are writing out there today.”
Smith said he hopes enough say unpaid Internet activity “is not an expenditure or contribution, or at least activity done by regular Internet journals, to cover sites like CNET, Slate and Salon. Otherwise, it's very likely that the Internet is going to be regulated, and the FEC and Congress will be inundated with e-mails saying, ‘How dare you do this!’"
