Agency chief warns of ‘regulatory regime’ watching the Internet

Disclosure rules pushed by Democrats could result in the creation of a government review board monitoring the Internet, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) warned Monday.

{mosads}”It really is a specter of a government review board culling the Internet daily,” Republican FEC Chairman Lee Goodman said during an interview with Fox News. “I don’t know how we could begin to regulate all the hundreds of thousands of political commentaries online.”

The FEC deadlocked last month on the question of whether there should be more stringent reporting requirements for political advertisements that are distributed only on the Internet.

The case centered on two online campaign ads from 2012 posted to YouTube.  

A Democrat on the commission, Ann Ravel, said the FEC needs to reevaluate its approach to political reporting requirements to crack down on campaign advertising online.

“Since its inception, this effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators has been stretched to cover slickly-produced ads aired solely on the Internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV,” Ravel said in a statement Friday.

Media content is already exempt from FEC disclosure rules. Currently, the FEC only requires the disclosure of “paid Internet advertising placed on another person’s website.” Campaigns and outside groups have long been required to report their spending on television ads to the commission.

Goodman said the current system is fine and warned that enforcement of Internet rules would be nearly impossible. 

“There are hundreds of thousands of blogs, websites, podcasts, webcasts, and I can’t imagine a regulatory regime where the federal government starts culling websites and YouTube posts on a daily basis to identify those that might not have registered and reported their content with those online posts,” he said. “And then contacting those individuals, asking, ‘How much did you actually spend on this?’”

Goodman vowed that he and the two other Republicans on the FEC “will oppose any effort to regulate online political speech.”

Ravel said next year she will gather technologists, activists and others to discuss new ways for the FEC to handle changes in online advertising.

—updated 1:30 p.m.