FTC Plans to Regulate Blogger Freebies — Meanwhile, financial scams and sketchy phoneco practices go unnoticed. Hm. There is something fishy about this.
According to a report by the Associated Press, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering to monitor blogs for undisclosed sponsored blog posts. According to the FTC, bloggers who don’t disclose that they received freebies once these new rules go into effect could become the target on an FTC investigation. These new guidelines, possibly with modifications, will most likely go into effect later this summer, and would mark the first time that the FTC tries to patrol the blogosphere.
As Andy Beal rightly points out, “the only bloggers that need to be wary of any new FTC guidelines are the ones that have brought this on us all.” The FTC isn’t likely to care about the blogger who used a coupon to get the free hamburger he/she blogged about. But there is a whole subculture of bloggers who make a living of undisclosed freebies and “sponsored conversations.” According to CNet’s Caroline McCarthy, however, these rules could even extend to undisclosed affiliate links. Under the new guidelines, bloggers would have to disclose if they are being compensated and, if they don’t, the FTC could order them to pay restitution to their readers.
Pay restitution to their readers? Huh?
Found by Aric Mackey.
I don’t see why bloggers should be held to higher standards than the regular press. Most piquantly, I remember that many years ago, everybody’s favorite computer magazine gave its annual award for technical excellence to MS-DOS. The runner-up, DR-DOS. Of course, it was easy to see that MS took out ads in the magazine and Digital Research did not. Fair enough. But the kicker was that DR-DOS was clearly the better product. It blew MS-DOS out of the water. When the stuff hit the fan, the magazine tried to weasel that for “technical excellence” you should read “greater sales”.
Well, if I hadn’t learnt before, that taught me to take that magazine’s judgments with a chunk of salt, low sodium diet be damned.
But I see this FTC measure as wrong-headed. The Internet is “for entertainment only”. Of course, when a fraud takes place, or if I receive UCE (spam), that should be dealt with under laws that should already exist.
I think that this, like the horrible measures proposed for Canada (where the national police misplaced some crucial emails for months in the inquiry of why they killed a Polish tourist who was effectively lost in an airport. How can these same lunkheads make investigative sense out of the trillions of messages they’re going to force retention of?), are part of a plot of governments to tax and otherwise encroach on the Internet. I wonder if the FTC will offshore this monitoring? They could do it for pennies on the dollar during low diurnal times in the telephone support trade–in India. But it is a job that really needs to be done at all?
To those of you who believe this is a good thing because it will lend journalistic type legitimacy to bloggers…why do you feel you need to get legitimacy through the government? Why can’t you seek legitimacy simply through the numbers of people who read your blogs because through experience they’ve come to trust you? Stop relying so much on the nanny-state to make your decisions for you. Next thing you know, you’ll be forced to pay registration fees to the government just to tweet. They’ll have to find some way to pay for people to “regulate” the numerous bloggers on the internet…
One last thing…I think the advent of the information age is actually making all this government regulation obsolete. Maybe 50 years ago, when the only sources of information you could get about a product was through advertisements(think Madmen)and if you were lucky, someone you knew dealt with the product and you could get their opinion on it. Now, you have a million people bloggin, tweeting, etc about almost any product you might come across. You don’t need the nanny state to protect you from klondike pushing bloggers who are on the take…you can find a million other legitamite klondike critics to counter that w/ a simple google search, half of which who will expose the fakers themselves.
Screw you FTC! Play the FTC off, keyboard cat.
Finally, Dvorak’s Costco payola will be exposed.
#22 – I was specifically referring to things like LEGALLY being able to protect your sources as a journalist.
Calm down, bub.
#20 MacGuy – you may be on to something.
Today (23rd) Obama gave a breaking news conference on Iran and actually called out “the guy from Huffington Post” in acknowledging that many in Iran were communicating their thoughts and pictures via the Net and asked him what questions and comments, if any, he had in relation..
-If that wasn’t an opening shot to a ringing endorsement of legitimizing a Net News source, i don’t what is..
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However imo, this is just a litmus test for developing tools to squelch political speech/enemies or anyone else that refuses to let “sleeping dogs lie”
we’ll have to see if it follows the bush era of extremely vague executive orders and laws in it’s definition and execution.
or..maybe its just to guarantee the unemployed / low-income masses have no way to earn or enjoy any happiness in life unless they work for “The Man”
*shrug*
-s