Three cheers for Randall Rothenberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for having the guts to send this splendid open letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Jon Leibowitz about the agency’s new disclosure rules for bloggers. Rothenberg’s entertaining and brutally honest letter is a rarity for a trade association chief. Most of the time trade associations fall all over themselves to whisper sweet-nothings in the ears of regulators, even when those regulators are out to crush the industries in question. But Rothernberg doesn’t pull any punches in his letter to Chairman Leibowitz. After walking through some of the stunning ambiguities of the rules, such as how much “weight consumers give to [a] review” by a blogger who might have a commercial sponsor, Rothenberg asks:
With all due respect, Mr. Chairman: Huh? Does the FTC really intend to probe America’s opinion-mongering apparatus this closely? Do you have a team of Freuds and Jungs able to examine “the weight” consumers give such opinion – and the way they weigh that weight? Naturally, this expedition from Oceania – that’s the place Big Brother ruled – should be worrisome to all Americans, and to all viewers, readers, listeners, users, and providers of any communications medium. But for the 400 members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises struggling to build their businesses in the face of the worst decline in marketing spending since the 1930’s, the implication that online social media represent a separate class of communications channels with less Constitutional protection than corporate-owned newspapers, radio stations, or cable television networks is of particularly grave concern. They – and we — are not arguing that bloggers and social media be treated differently than incumbent media. After all, most newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television networks, in recognition that Americans are embracing new forms of social communications, have established their own blogs, boards, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and the like. Rather, we’re saying the new conversational media should be accorded the same rights and freedoms as other communications channels.
Yep, exactly right and it echoes the questions I’ve raised here before. And his letter just gets better from there regarding the enforcement nightmare presented by these ambiguous rules:
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