The campaign finance crusader-controllers, who will not rest until all campaigns are run by bureaucrats, sued the FEC, demanding the commission start regulating the Net. A judge, loyal to the power class, agreed with the crusader-controllers, and the FEC will start writing rules and hiring regulators to dragnet the Net.
The FCC needs to be abolished. Now!
Here is the whole rest of the article. Freepers need to wake up on this one, or Free Republic, as we know it, will be gone.
"...As Republicans and rightists seek to stymie libertarians, Democrats and leftists seek to squash another outpost of personal freedom: the Internet. Bloggers, in particular, are an ornery and uppity bunch — who knows who or what they'll topple next? So any incumbent politician would be well advised, career-wise, to beat them back down.
Fortunately for Incumbent-ocrats, there's an anti-blogging law already on the books. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold, established a regime that empowers the government to supervise all campaign spending, including "in kind" contributions, such as copying and circulating campaign materials. Which is to say, every American with a copying machine is potentially violating the law, because he or she might be seen as helping a candidate too much. That's the essence of McCain-Feingold: free political speech should not be free, after all.
Flukishly, the Federal Election Commission, conceived out of the marriage of Big Brother and the Nanny State, went against its power-grabbing parents' wishes and issued a strongly libertarian opinion, saying the Internet should be exempt from such regulation.
That stance didn't last long. The campaign finance crusader-controllers, who will not rest until all campaigns are run by bureaucrats, sued the FEC, demanding the commission start regulating the Net. A judge, loyal to the power class, agreed with the crusader-controllers, and the FEC will start writing rules and hiring regulators to dragnet the Net.
FEC Commissioner Brad Smith, who fought the good fight for freedom, laments, "The basic paradigm has shifted, from the presumption of no regulation of the Internet to the presumption of regulation." While Smith's commission is inclined to regulate lightly, it's easy to imagine an FEC piling on new regulations in the future.
Some day, some regulator will pile on the piece of bureaucratic straw that breaks freedom's back. That regulator will win a big reward from the ruling class."