Bloggers Beware!

Have you heard?

The Federal Election Commission is beginning the process of extending its controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet, potentially threatening political blogging and online punditry.

I heard about this earlier today in an E-Week email, but was unable to link to the associated story until just a few minutes ago. But this isn't news, is it? We've been hearing rumors out there in the blogosphere for months about potential "censorship of the internet". But I always thought it would be censorship of pornographers or something like that. Not bloggers! Not grassroots efforts in support of candidates. Whatever happened to "free speech"? McCain-Feingold apparently don't care much about the right to free speech of bloggers.

In an interview with CNET News.com, Smith warns that the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictions may soon be applied to the Internet, thanks to a recent ruling by a federal judge that any coordinated political activity over the Internet must be regulated.

This new decision essentially overturned the FEC's vote in 2002 to exempt most Internet communications from the notoriously restrictive McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

The results could be devastating for online free speech.

Some examples:

* Blogs and other Web sites -- even personal home pages -- could be fined by the federal government for merely linking to a candidate’s Web site.

* Forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, or extensively quoting a candidate’s literature via email, could be a crime.

* Blogs might be faced with having to hire a lawyer to approve their political commentary and linking, or just stop speaking out on political issues.

This is serious business.

What are they afraid of?