LAWMAKERS: HANDS OFF WEB LOGS
Internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face
regulation as political groups, lawmakers and online journalists said Friday.
Ref. https://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/1...reut/index.html
As you can probably imagine, this is a huge point of discussion in the blogosphere right now. The thing is, because of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, blogs really should be tightly regulated. That Act is the worst attack on the freedom of speech that I know of, yet President Bush signed it, and the Supreme Courts appears to support it.
The FEC won't really have any choice in the matter. The House of Representatives passed the law, the way it is, in order to restrict political speech. Just because they finally noticed some of the results of it due to the "Law of Unintended Consequences" that applies to all legislature, they can't just complain about it and expect to change those results. They will have to take some sort of action.
Of course, the best action they could take would be to repeal the Campaign Reform Act. But that won't happen. It is too powerful a tool to keep incumbents in office.
These days there is a fine line between opinion, freedom of speech and mutiny or terrorism for that matter. The digital age enables mass movement of communication in all forms. Even if this were to be rigorously enforced this can only work for servers in the US and then again people will just move their data to some country that will allow it. unless, as many other things... the US seeks to make this an International Law.
This subject was never, in any way, about "international law". It is about the fact that the legislators in Congress, both the House and the Senate, want to restrict people from political speech. The law, as written, is extremely bad, and the implementation of it is worse. The fact that President Bush signed it into law, and that Republican Representatives and Senators helped pass it is the greatest single evidence of how corrupt and despicable the political process has become.
As far as it applies to blogging, there are some excellent articles about it on C/Net:
https://news.com.com/Bloggers+narrowly+dodg...35724&subj=news
QUOTE |
Political bloggers and other online commentators narrowly avoided being slammed with a sweeping set of Internet regulations this week. When the Federal Election Commission kicked off the process of extending campaign finance rules to the Internet on Thursday, the public document was substantially altered from one prepared just two weeks earlier and reviewed by CNET News.com. The 44-page document, prepared by the FEC general counsel's office and dated March 10, took a radically different approach and would have imposed decades-old rules designed for federal campaigns on many political Web sites and bloggers. According to the March 10 document, political Web sites would be regulated by default unless they were password-protected and read by fewer than 500 people in a 30-day period. Many of those Web sites would have been required to post government-mandated notices or risk violating campaign finance laws. The FEC is in the unusual position of being required to extend the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act to online policking because of a federal judge's order last fall. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the FEC improperly exempted the Internet and ordered the agency to rewrite its rules. |
QUOTE |
Nighthawk: This subject was never, in any way, about "international law". |
I blog on all kinds of issues from religion to politics to personal affairs. I would hate to think that my political views that I post on a blog could be regulated by someone else. If that is allowed, then how close are we to regulating blogs of other natures? What about religion? If we can regulate political speech, then why not regulate what you can say regarding religion? We cannot allowed the freedom to speak as we wish about what we wish to be taken away. It would be a travesty to see that freedom taken away while we fight to establish that freedom for another country.