alexpgp | Assume the position!

From Personal Democracy Forum (via Slashdot):

[The] San Francisco Board of Supervisors [...] announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate. [...] Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

This sounds like an echo of something that whiffed from the Federal Election Commission a little while ago.

Five hundred hits? Over what period of time? I bet you could set up a website with a completely blank home page and rack up that many hits in just a few days from script kiddies looking for unprotected Windows systems. Hits from script kiddies aside, would comments and trackbacks from Mexican sites offering gambling, porn, and meds count?

Look for this approach to get real popular, especially as local politicos increasingly come to the jarring realization that they do not generally enjoy the same incumbent-favoring protections that their less local colleagues-in-crime enjoy, and hence, they are more vulnerable to becoming suddenly unemployed (by dint of losing an election) in direct proportion to the extent that the public seeks information and engages in debate.

There are interesting times ahead.

Cheers...