• by Shankar Gupta , March 3, 2006

The Center for Democracy and Technology has weighed in on a pending bill in Congress aimed at protecting political speech online, and found it wanting.

The CDT maintains that the pending proposal, H.R. 1606, isn't broad enough--and suggested instead that Congress "exempt the vast majority of individual speakers on the Internet from campaign finance laws, without creating loopholes that could be easily exploited by state political parties and large donors."

The bill currently being considered by Congress, H.R. 1606, exempts Internet communications from regulation as "public communication" under the Federal Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1971, which was amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain-Feingold.

The CDT proposal mirrors the language of H.R. 1606, but would not exempt paid ads costing more than $5,000 a year in aggregate, and also generally would not exempt online communications made by state, district, or local political parties, or a political committee. The CDT proposal also would exclude individuals who spend less than $5,000 on their sites from the reporting requirements.

Last March, former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith set off a controversy in the blogosphere by publicly saying the commission might begin regulating contributions to blogs. In the past, FEC regulations implementing the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 excluded all online communication from the definition of "public communication." But in 2003, federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the agency could no longer blanketly exclude the Web from campaign finance regulations.