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| Home Front: Politix |
| Freedom of the Digital Press |
| 2005-11-02 |
| The House is expected to vote today on a bill to protect free speech on the Internet. The threat? The campaign-finance-regulation lobby — which has used the courts to expand 2002's McCain-Feingold speech crackdown to cover the Internet. This means that bloggers and others engaging in political speech online are now in danger of being charged with making illegal campaign contributions, simply for having the audacity to open their Web browsers without permission from the speech police. So Congress needs to act. A bill being offered by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the Online Freedom of Speech Act — which is identical to a bill being offered in the Senate by Minority Leader Harry Reid — would provide the Internet with a blanket exemption from McCain-Feingold. Reid? Pre-meltdown. It's a good start. And, arguably, just what Congress intended to do when it first passed the law. Simply put, the campaign-finance-regulation lobby is smearing this bill and its defenders. They claim it will reopen the soft-money spigot that McCain & Co. spent so much time shutting off, simply channeling the money onto the Internet. While we are basically allergic to the entire concept of campaign-finance "reform" — it's a profound threat to the First Amendment — this bill would do no such thing. It wouldn't repeal limits on unlimited corporate or individual giving. And it wouldn't do anything else to undermine existing campaign-finance laws, either. All it would do is protect average citizens from government harassment as they go about expressing their views online — making it clear that blogs, Web magazines, Internet petitions and other forms of online speech won't be classified as campaign contributions, subject to regulation. That this should bother the "reformers" so much is telling. While they claim to want to create a "level playing field," where ideas compete without regard to the amount of money behind them, they've come to view an unfettered Internet as the biggest threat to their schemes. But why? After all, when it comes to the Internet, money hardly translates into influence. Plenty of expensively produced Web sites are flops, while some of the most popular Web sites and blogs cost virtually nothing to run. The real problem, it seems, is that the speech police don't like any speech that they don't get to . . . well, police. Heh The Hensarling-Reid approach is the best way to head off an assault on the Internet — for now. The next step is to start reconsidering whether regulating political speech is a good idea under any circumstances. |
| Posted by:.com |