Uncle Sam, Meet the Bloggers

For Richard Morrison, the $350,000 he received in online donations got the politically unknown Democrat within spitting distance of unseating Rep. Tom Delay, R-Texas, in 2004.

A good part of that money was raised by blogs, which flexed their collective muscle for the first time in last year's elections, raising funds for conservatives and liberals alike. One right-wing blog, RedState, asked people to give directly to candidates and ultimately help raise an estimated $10,000, according to Erick-Woods Erickson, a lawyer and political consultant affiliated with the blog. One left leaning blog, Daily Kos, raised money for a dozen candidates, pulling in nearly $537,000, with Morrison, who landed 41 percent of the vote, getting $60,000.

"But blogs aren't just about getting money," Morrison said in a telephone interview.

Besides tapping small donor bases, bloggers help organize volunteers and keep alive such stories as the Swift Boat Veterans or Karl Rove's alleged role in the CIA leak.

But is the future of blogs, those symbols of the Internet's democratic promise, in jeopardy?

A federal judge has ordered the Federal Election Commission to extend campaign finance laws to the Internet. And the regulatory foray has sparked debate about whether the anti-establishment, rant-prone but politically relevant blogosphere is more akin to a world of activists or journalists.

Bloggers worry that bringing bloggers under the regulatory scope of campaign finance laws will mean incurring debilitating legal fees to defend against partisan lawsuits or FEC investigations. That is unless the government classifies blogs as "press," which are exempted from campaign finance laws.

The whole affair has anti-establishment bloggers taking some ever-so-establishment paths to Washington.

At the end of June, prominent bloggers testified before the FEC in an effort to protect the nascent but exploding Net subculture, which now counts some 11 million blogs, from the thin end of a regulatory wedge.

The fuss all started in March when FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith told a reporter for CNET that regulation was coming down the pipe. The article, in which Smith said the judge's ruling "would strike deep into the heart of the Internet and the bloggers who are writing out there today," flamed across the blogosphere. Other FEC commissioners were soon on record saying they had no intention of regulating blogs. Even so, the issue had taken on a life of its own, seeding widespread debate over the role of blogs and the reasonable reach of what many see as inevitable regulation.

Exemption as Grail

The FEC is considering several complicated issues and could exempt blogs from regulation for now. But any eventual regulation scheme will pivot on the key question of whether blogs qualify for what's known in FEC-speak as the "press exemption."

Until now, the federal government has taken a largely hands-off approach to Internet regulation, voting in 2002 not to extend campaign laws to Internet activity. But last fall the District Court in Washington D.C. told the FEC to bring coordinated political activity under the scope of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. That law in part restricts corporations, non-profits and labor unions from running "electioneering" ads.

News media corporations, however, were handed an exemption to such restrictions so that any newspaper, television or radio networks can spend as much as they want for political coverage and publish whatever they wish about politics as often as they wish, without any interference, all of which blogs could do if the FEC grants them the exemption.

It is unclear exactly how blogs would be affected if they were included in the FEC's attempt to bring Internet activity under the scope of the McCain-Feingold law.