Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives last night narrowly turned back an effort to exempt all Internet communication from campaign-finance regulations, dealing at least a temporary defeat to a bill that would allow unfettered political advertising -- and unlimited spending -- in the vast frontier of cyberspace. Supporters fell short of the two-thirds vote they needed to pass the measure in the expedited fashion Republican leaders were pushing for, with 225 members voting in favor and 182 voting no. But House leaders could bring the bill up again through the normal legislative process, and yesterday's vote indicates more than enough...

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- sorry, that's Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold and Reps. Chris Shays and Marty Meehan, Congress' Dark Knights of Campaign-Finance Reform -- have a message for bloggers: They're not "out to get them." The scare quotes are theirs. In comments submitted to the Federal Election Commission last week, as the regulatory body seeks advice on how to apply the McCain-Feingold law to the Internet, the enemies of the First Amendment had to walk a fine line. On one side, the politicians in them wanted to genuflect to democracy, open debate and all the...

<p>Web loggers, who pride themselves on freewheeling political activism, might face new federal rules on candidate endorsements, online fundraising and political ads, though bloggers who don't take money from political groups would not be affected.</p> <p>Draft rules from the Federal Election Commission, which enforces campaign finance laws, would require that paid political advertisements on the Internet declare who funded the ad, as television spots do.</p>

Something remarkable is happening as a Republican Congress and president move to crackdown on 527 groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Liberals are realizing that something's fishy. Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingold (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. the End of Free Speech As We Know It), a smattering of Democrats and liberal activists are slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech. After all, what would prevent incumbents in Congress...

China soups up Internet censoring filter   The Chinese government's Internet controls have kept pace with rapid changes in technology and are buttressed by self-censorship, university researchers said in a study Thursday. One of the study's principal investigators, John Palfrey, warned that the sophistication of China's controls raises the prospect of a broken Internet and could show other closed states that censorship can be effective. "Do we want to have multiple Internets, a China Wide Web, a U.S. Wide Web, a Saudi Wide Web, or do we want the whole World Wide Web?" asked Palfrey, who is executive director of...

Bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups, lawmakers and online journalists said Friday. In separate letters, Democratic lawmakers and Internet commentators urged the Federal Election Commission to make sure that political Web sites that serve as focal points for political discussion, such as Wonkette.com and Freerepublic.com, don't have to comply with campaign-finance rules. "Curtailing blogs and other online publications will dampen the impact of new voices in the political process and will do a disservice to the millions of voters who rely on the Web for original, insightful political commentary," said the Online Coalition,...