WASHINGTON -- A week after the Federal Election Commission proposed rules on how the internet should be covered by campaign-finance laws, one thing seems clear: The growing ranks of political bloggers are watching developments closely.
"The real question is where do we go from here," said Mike Krempasky, co-founder of conservative blog RedState.org. "There's not a real understanding of how politics and the internet works at the Federal Election Commission."
Krempasky made those comments Thursday at the U.S. Capitol, where a panel of experts gathered to discuss whether political bloggers deserve FEC oversight in light of their often cushy relationships with political campaigns and groups already regulated by the agency.
On March 23, the FEC issued revised draft rules (.pdf) outlining which internet communications would be subject to campaign-finance law. The FEC had originally issued rules that exempted all internet communications from its overall definition of "public communication" that can trigger the application of federal election rules.
But Reps. Martin Meehan (D-Massachusetts) and Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut) sued to scrap those regulations on the grounds they didn't go far enough. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia then ordered the FEC to take another crack at it.
The FEC's revised draft rules exempt internet communications except for paid advertisements.
The question now is what exactly constitutes paid advertising on the web. Is a blog or website that supports a candidate actually an ad? What if the blogger takes money from the campaign? What if the blogger is soliciting contributions?
The agency has so far taken a largely hands-off approach. For example, the newly proposed rules don't require bloggers who take money from political campaigns to disclose directly such payments to their readers (although existing law requires campaigns to disclose such payments to the FEC).
"The bottom line is that we're not imposing any additional disclosure requirement," said FEC chairman Scott Thomas.
The FEC has, however, proposed requiring disclaimers of any political affiliation in e-mails that reach more than 500 recipients in "substantially similar communications." But that mass e-mail rule would only apply when the e-mail addresses in question were purchased from a third party -- so bloggers who send out e-mails to subscribers would presumably remain unaffected.
Also unclear is whether all bloggers should be included in the current "media exemption," which exempts the traditional news media from the FEC's contribution and expenditure rules.
Thomas said the agency would look at the "track record" of the online publication or blog in question but admitted that the agency is scratching its head a bit. He invited concerned citizens to send suggestions to the FEC.
"I anticipate that there will be some very constructive comment," he said. "I want to assure people that we're keeping an open mind about this."
John Morris, director of the Internet Standards, Technology & Policy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, urged the FEC to keep its language as broad as possible because "We can't imagine ... the modes of speech that will be available to us in five years."
