Yesterday, Xeni blogged Declan McCullough’s interview with Federal Election Commissioner Bradley Smith, in which he described the coming regulatory regime for blogs at election time, through which linking to your candidate would be counted as a “donation” to the campaign and would be subject to regulation. Fafblog — the best political satire site on the net — has a marvellous take on this today:
Campaign finance reform is coming to the internet, and the Medium Lobster must say it’s long overdue. No longer will bloggers simply be able to freely link to a candidate’s website, or wildly and irresponsibly endorse one politician’s views over another, or corrupt the democratic process with an overpowering onslaught of HTML-borne free speech. Thanks to John McCain, Russ Feingold and U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, political speech on the internet will be as the Founding Fathers always wished it would be: bottled up and controlled.
The Medium Lobster’s one complaint is that the judge’s ruling doesn’t go far enough. Certainly the excesses of the blogosphere will now be held in place, but how can there be true campaign reform when the spoken word goes unchecked? Every day, millions of Americans make unchecked and unregulated political contributions by making political endorsements on sophisticated verbal logs – or “verblogs,” if you will – comprised of billions of currently untracked sound waves transmitted through the atmosphere. Until these words are properly tracked, counted, and restricted by the FEC according to the arbitrary limits of McCain-Feingold, American democracy will forever remain a prisoner of Big Speech.