Blog: March 2005

I've always been very nervous about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and the initative to regulate Internet speech is a great example of why. Reducing the ability of those with a lot of money to corrupt the political system is a very worthwhile goal; reducing the ability of citizens to participate in the political process is very bad. Applying the McCain-Feingold rubric - requiring FEC disclosures, and counting anything that helps a candidate as an in-kind contribution - to all political activity, including individuals speaking out online or groups of people gathering for political purposes, will stifle both. We'll end up with a world where professional PACs can participate in the political process, but nobody else can. And that's just as bad a future as any the law is trying to prevent.

In the reactions to this on blogs and mailing lists, I've seen a lot of apt comparisons. Is it a contribution every time someone tells a family member about a candidate over the dinner table? Is a lawn sign a contribution equal to the value of renting billboard space on that street - potentially very high in a city?

The problem here is the same as one around copyright: individuals have become used to doing certain things, like singing songs to each other, giving books to their friends, or talking about candidates. The Internet allows these activities to suddenly reach orders of magnitude more people. People put home movies to music using popular songs all the time, but if they put them on the Internet, content industries can find out about it and sue. If I encourage my friends to vote for someone, that's fine, but if I do it online, millions of people might read that and suddenly it's something the FEC wants to regulate. But the law shouldn't drastically change our behavior just because we live in a more connected world and can communicate with more people.

Update: Fafblog gives a great satirical take on the same point:

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.