Government Passes Legislation Regulating Online Blogosphere

The blogosphere is a weird and interesting place. Think of a topic and I'd bet anything (if I were a betting man - er, woman) there's a blog about it somewhere out there. I read Cracked (comedy), Go Fug Yourself (fashion), Cannelle et Vanille (food), Occupation: Girl (film/TV/general hilarity), and Guy Speak (advice), among others, pretty regularly. But there's always new stuff popping up, especially in this age, where putting stuff on the Internet can make you a buttload of money.

Apparently - or so I've read in The New York Times - one of the new things to hit the Intertubes (thank you, Nick Nadel, for this new addition to my lexicon) is the new law requiring full disclosure in the case of internet testimonials. That is, bloggers who receive and/or review free swag from companies looking for what is essentially free advertising are bound by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to disclose their ties to said companies. Why anyone would give a good review to a product that sucks is beyond me, but I guess that's what the spokespeople for Proactiv get paid to do.

This new restriction also keeps advertisers (and by that token, their middlemen) from endlessly yammering on about the effects of a product that are untrue. This keeps hapless schmucks like you and me from blowing a wad of cash on a supposedly awesome wrinkle-removing cream that actually has the unfortunate side effect of leaving spots on your face, or a weight-loss supplement that says it will give you a svelte physique ASAP but is actually made of freebase cocaine. I'm more curious as to why the FTC isn't paying attention to those late-night infomercials that pop up if you watch the Food Network past 4 a.m. Maybe I'm the only person who watches the Food Network in the wee hours of the morn, but still - someone ought to be scoping out what those super-Viagra male-enhancement supplements are actually made out of.

This isn't the first time the government has thrown its weight around when it comes to the Internet, of course, but they've been coming on strong lately. In January 2009, Canadian model Liskula Cohen sued Google because an anonymous poster on a Web site called "Skanks in NYC" on Blogger (a blogging Web site owned by the Google) called her "skanky" and "an old hag." Because Cohen is a public figure - she was a former Vogue cover girl - she was able to sue for defamation and Google was forced to turn over the name of the blogger in August 2009. This ended up causing even more of a mess, since the blogger, Rosemary Port, turned around and sued Google for giving up her information. "A line has to be drawn somewhere regarding what people can say anonymously just because they're using the Internet to say it," said Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.com, whose post on the case was made available on The Washington Post's Web site.

It seems logical - these restrictions on what you can and cannot say online are protecting all of us in one way or another. The FTC wants to keep those money-grubbing companies from screwing us over with their crappy products and their Twitter spam (if I had a nickel for every time someone tried to follow me for mentioning some random word, like "computer" or "UPS" or "music" . ), and the Feds want to keep us from talking smack about people we don't know. I mean, can Port honestly say she knows Cohen well enough to determine whether or not she is as skanky as her blog alleges? "Ugly" is an opinion. Lord knows most of us have thrown that insult around as casually as any other word. "Skanky," in this case, seems pointlessly mean. And I know the old saw about throwing stones in a glass house - I've done my fair share of smack-talking - but I'm not stupid enough to do it on a public Web site for the world (and the victims of my vitriol) to see.