Uh oh...

CNET - Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.

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.

Here are some changes that could be made should Smith and his cronies get their way:

1. Links to campaign websites could be considered "contributions." Meaning that the number of times you link to any given candidates official website could be limited.



2. If you post favorable comments about a candidate you could be asked to detail percentage of the price of the computer as well as the price of the electricity used in this political advocacy. These costs will be deemed "contributions" and regulated by the FEC.



3. Any sort of coordinated political activity on the internet could face regulation. This includes email lists, blogs, ordinary websites and discussion groups.



4. Reproducing all, or even part, of any campaign's official literature could be counted as a contribution and regulated by the FEC.

I don't know about the rest of you, but this is very troubling. Campaign finance reform has done enough to stifle free speech in this country. Its limitation of non-internet advocacy should be enough to over turn it. Instead they're looking to use it to limit online advocacy as well.

Frankly, that's a load of bunk. Bloggers are nothing if not ordinary U.S. citizens looking to make a difference by expressing their opinions. Some times we support candidates, sometimes we work against them. But that's how the system is supposed to work.

It is not something that should be regulated.

Stephen Bainbridge has more.

Update:

One interesting thing about extending McCain-Feingold to blogs, how are they going to keep track of all the links? I'd think that it would take an amazing amount of bureacracy to monitor it all. And what about links from international sources? If links are considered contributions how would they handle a link to a candidate's website from a foreign website visited by Americans?

And what about negative links? During the last election cycle I posted more links to Kerry's campaign website than I did to President Bush's, but my commentary that went along with the links was negative. If a link is a contribution, do negative links count as negative contributions?