I’d highly encourage you to get a basic understanding of both the regulatory process and the background on the players involved before you wade into this debate.

It sounds like your friend has a good point about abuse of an anonymous or misleading public persona. I don’t agree that, in order to deal with it now, we need to push our congress to pass a bill that comes to them in the dead of night and has only been read thoroughly by its barely masked sponsors. For example – have you heard about the reconstruction of New Orleans? (The road to hell actually is paved with good intentions! Actual fact!)

As I’ve written elsewhere, here’s my fear: Suppose I supported KANG in the 2008 primaries, and suppose a pro-KODOS blogger decided that I couldn’t possibly have taken such noxious preferences honestly. So he puts together all the posts he can showing what he thinks is my lack of objectivity, and he sends it to the FEC to have them investigate whether I’m getting paid under the table.

If they believe there’s any merit to the claim, they will start to investigate—subpoena my email archives, bank records and telephone records; call me in for a deposition, etc.

It’s an awful tool to give bloggers and their readers to use against each other.

I’m still not clear on the main issue, but I thought I’d comment on this point.

It’s generally accepted that for such scholars to be directly funded by private interests without disclosure is a breach of ethics – Milloy, Fumento and Bandow all lost their jobs over this.

The funding of the thinktanks themselves can be a little murky, but there’s information on most of them.

It has something to do with the “market place of iideas” where competing thoughts and points of view compete with one another and do battle with one another to win converts and adherents.

Thus, if there are going to be LIES disseminated on the Internet, the remedy is to have other people disseminating the truth in the hope that people, who have a choice to be exposed to both, will eventually make the right choice.

To me, this point of view is intimately related to the idea of “democracy.”

In this sense, the Internet is truly a democratic, market place of ideas and points of view where ANYONE can say whatever he or she wants, and anyone has the choice as to buy into it, shit on it it, or choose another point of view.

In this sense, the Internet is more FREE than corporate media, where there truly is NO market place of ideas, but instead the choices are made by a relative few editors and owners as to what the public will be exposed to.

Yet, paternalistic IDIOTS like Darr want to regulate the Internet?

“But it doesn’t change the fact that Thune’s bought and paid for astroturf blogs helped swing the race in South Dakota”

Yeah. And? Let me help: They disclosed it, too. No one but the most ardent of regulators actually contemplated forcing bloggers to disclose anything – not just because it’s patently anti-freedom – but BECAUSE IT’S NOT ALLOWED BY LAW. Disclosure falls on those who write checks – not those who take them.

And as far as Carol goes – she’s one of the nicest, most pleasant people I’ve ever met that manages to get freedom and speech (and the combination of both) so mind-bendingly wrong. She’s a great person, but I’m glad she’s not voting on our ability to speak freely.

I’d also note that not once during the whole debate did anyone from the pro-regulation side contact me or my clients to ask “what are you guys doing, and how can we make sure to protect you?” or anything like that. They were the only people active in this whole thing who didn’t. Indeed, at a May 2005 conference that IPDI sponsored, Ms. Darr made it sound like listservs were the real threat. They didn’t get the technology, and they never tried to.

What I found really helpful later on were the comments from Marc Elias, who was the chief counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign (and neither a consultant nor an anti-CFR think-tanker), and this is from his opening statement to the Commission:

[W]ith all due respect, this is a rulemaking in search of a problem. I can give you a litany of problems that I experienced through the campaign finance laws as the general counsel to the Kerry campaign. We had problems with the rules regarding travel, the rules regarding coordination, the rules regarding soft money, the rules regarding appearing and attending at state party events, the rules regarding agency. In fact, if you opened up 11 CFR, we could literally start at page 1 and end several hundred pages later with all of the issues we faced. We never faced a problem with the Internet. It just wasn’t a problem. I’m not suggesting that in 10 years, there may not be a problem with Halliburton starting a blog or setting up some complicated Web scheme, but if that happened, this Commission would still be around. Congress would still be around. And at that point, Congress or the Commission would be in a position to address legislatively or by rulemaking the exact problem, the actual problem that is appearing rather than at this point the Commission guessing as to what, in two years or three years or five years or 10 years what problem may come to the forefront.

A lot has been said about the democratizing effect of the Internet, and I won’t rehash that. You’ve heard that from others; you’ve read it in our comments. The Kerry campaign relied to an unprecedented degree on using the Internet as an organizing tool, both financially as well as an unprecedented number of volunteers who came to the campaign through the Internet. And one of my concerns with the course that the Commission seems to be heading down is that any time you regulate, whether you regulate a lot, or you regulate a little, you send a message to the community that there are now traps to be avoided. If you define bloggers as in the media exemption or out of the media exemption, by applying regulations to the Internet, individuals, ordinary folks out there reading the newspaper, that there is now regulation of the Internet, and it makes them that much less likely to get involved.
You can read the FEC draft yourself and determine what they intended. I can also point you towards the reform community’s comments on the FiredUp advisory opinion for more on how they viewed partisan websites.

If anything, it’s supportive in the sense that it’s evidence that journalists are already political operatives :-).

In terms of the reasoning process, of weighing evidence, I’m impressed that one side is political consultants and anti-campaign-finance-law think-tankers, while the overwhelming opinion of academics and disinterested lawyers was that there was never a serious threat to average citizens. The mau-mau-ing of Carol Darr isn’t coming just from the mudpit flamers, but a high-level action to intimidate her. Maybe that’s life in the big city, and politics is a tough business – but it goes a long way towards convincing me who to trust overall (which, sigh, is not an agreement with every statement made by that side).

To be sure, I was always leery of the pull of Big Money on all sides of this debate, and just had to trust my gut. I think we ended up okay.