The FTC Wants To Surf The ‘Net At Work

– Federal Agency Wants Expanded Powers To Go After … Wait For It … Wait For It … Bloggers! –

Thing must be pretty slow over at the FTC these days.

George Carlin is dead and can’t speak to the absurdity of trying to regulate speech, Howard Stern is on satellite radio where he can say whatever he wants and Janet Jackson is about 135 pounds overweight so no one cares if she shows her tits or not.

But in the regulation-fest that’s going on in Washington, D.C. these days, the FTC apparently feels the need to stake out some additional ground.

That’s not as easy as it looks. Most of the regulation has been spoken for already. The Secretary of the Treasury is now in charge of setting pay for bankers, designing cars for GM and picking out curtains for your new dining room.

The Fed wants broad authority to investigate whomever it feels like, to commit taxpayer funds as it sees fit and to be exempt from “limit two per customer” specials at their local supermarket.

If anybody asked them, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is probably looking for the power to tax any sports teams which feature a Native American mascot.

With all that, it’s hard for the FTC to find something else to regulate so that they, too, can justify a bigger budget.

But you should never underestimate the feral cunning of government bureaucrats.

The FTC decided they should be given the power to investigate bloggers who recommend products in their blogs.

As I sit here sipping my Diet Coke with Lime while typing on my Apple computer in a lounge chair I bought at Ikea and remind you to click on all the great vendors here on Bizzia, I started to feel like I was one of the bloggers being targeted by the FTC.

Fortunately, that’s not the case:

Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews.

So parents keeping blogs to update family members on their child’s first steps technically would fall under the FTC guidelines…

… they would need to think twice if, for instance, they praise parenting books they’ve just read and include links to buy them at a retailer like Amazon.com Inc.

Well, that’s a relief. It’s not like the FTC wants to target companies that promise to make me look 30 years younger, guarantee hundreds of sexy girls in my town looking to sleep with me or help me make a fortune working from home. They just want to regulate everybody. That certainly seems like a reasonable approach.

But, you may be thinking, what kind of rationale could the FTC possibly dream up to justify such an extensive dragnet?

Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices explains: “If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk. Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.”

You can tell the FTC is new to this whole “broadening of powers” thing. If you want expansive, draconian powers you need to justify it with some first-class fear mongering — preferably related to national security, the collapse of the entire financial system or global warming.

And you also need to tell people that what they know you’re doing is not really what you’re doing.

What Rich should have said was, “These people who blog and make $3.27 a month off affiliate marketing could be using the money to support terrorists or make a down payment on a foreign-made car. It’s up to us to stop it by proposing a reasonable plan that strikes a balance for limited oversight that only applies to the 50 million people who blog worldwide. We can take up regulating recommendations people make in casual conversation at a later date.”

In a related story, the FTC said it doesn’t care about product placement in Hollywood films because it doesn’t believe anyone would be influenced to buy a product just because they saw Ashton Kutcher use it in a movie.

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“Honestly, Bob. I had no idea the link on that guy’s blog pointed to this awesome porn site…”

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Thanks to Miki Saxon over at Leadership Turn for the head’s up on this story. I’d recommend her blog whether the FTC likes it or not.

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Image: Zuma Press

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