The FTC issued guidelines this week requiring bloggers to disclose whether they have received free products in exchange for endorsements. It was as if the FTC had read my post earlier this week praising the ScanSnap Scanner and my voluntary disclosure that the fine folks at Fujitsu had not plied me with a free gift, and said, “We like the cut of Chetson’s jib! We’ll create mandatory disclosure policies for the whole country!” Thanks FTC!
Al Lorenz (full disclosure: I don’t know Al, and he has never seen fit to send me a single present) had a good comment a few days ago about the double standard. The FTC rule is enough of a regulatory overreach that it’s got virtually everyone up in arms. Jack Shafer, another stingy bast*rd who has failed to send me any gifts of value, has a terrific article in Slate about the whole thing.
But I do want to defend the FTC in one small way: many people, including some of the same now griping about mandatory disclosure rules on poor-me bloggers, have no problem with the regulation of other kinds of pay for play schemes – see, Payola, 1950s. So there’s some logic to the idea that if radio broadcasters can be regulated on content, so can any kind of broadcasters, including blogger-broadcasters.
Greg Swann says:
> So there’s some logic to the idea that if radio broadcasters can be regulated on content, so can any kind of broadcasters, including blogger-broadcasters.
Long reach. Broadcasters are regulated according to the specious doctrines that spectral bandwidth is finite (what isn’t?) and belongs to “the public” (metaphysically-creative solipsism). Even stipulating both of those bogus ideas, neither applies to webloggers.
Here’s a better legal conundrum for the attorneys and philosophers among us: Blackstone says a previously undivided parcel of real estate comprises a cone of space from the center of earth and stretching to infinity. This is why I can shoot a duck flying over my property: It’s my duck.
Where did airplanes acquire the “right” to fly over my land? How did broadcasters come by the “right” to disturb my air with electromagnetic debris?
The mass usurpation of air rights, in the early twentieth century, was a truly spectacular expropriation, one which, to this day, almost no one knows about.
Sorry. Not hi-jacking your post, just having fun. For all of me, taking bribes, just by itself, is vile. Not disclosing them is worse, but it’s not like people can’t smell a rat in the commercial world. It’s only when kooks like Herbert Hoover insist that the spectrum belongs to “the public” that ordinarily-savvy people get swindled.
October 9, 2009 — 7:55 am
Damon Chetson says:
Long reach. Broadcasters are regulated according to the specious doctrines that spectral bandwidth is finite (what isn’t?) and belongs to “the public” (metaphysically-creative solipsism). Even stipulating both of those bogus ideas, neither applies to webloggers.
Long reach, but not a long reach because as you say, the idea that spectral bandwidth is particularly limited is specious.
So the FTC simply says, well, DARPA built the intertubes, and we already regulate the root – ICANN, for all the pretense, just an sub-agency of the Department of Commerce. So why not regulate what people on the internet say.
If you believe in rights in the way that you do, then those indeed would be possible conundrums. But rights aren’t real things. They’re metaphors. Think of it as “rights-talk”. Rights are socially constructed boundaries, like the rules of a baseball game. When they’re useful – you can’t kill me merely as a means to an end – then we think of them in strong ways. Where they’re not useful – you can’t fly 30k feet over my land because of my rights in private property – we don’t. Of course we don’t want to undermine the rights talk so that it’s worthless.
But we also don’t want to invest too much energy in the rights such that they become absurd.
As far as your last sentence, I agree. And the FTC rules merely make it more difficult to suss out who’s taking what bribes. People already can police things themselves, and respect the blogs like BHB that don’t take stuff for endorsing a product, and heap scorn upon blogs that do whore themselves for free product.
October 9, 2009 — 8:07 am
Greg Swann says:
> If you believe in rights in the way that you do, then those indeed would be possible conundrums. But rights aren’t real things. They’re metaphors. Think of it as “rights-talk”.
I’ve never said one way or another what I think about rights, not here, anyway. Everything I’m interested in turns on ontology: What is possible, not what I might wish were impossible.
Like this:
> you can’t kill me merely as a means to an end
Of course I can. As a matter of ontology, I can kill you for any or no reason. Moreover, if you have any plans to try to stop me, it might not be the best moment to start talking about your rights. The right that matters most, in that moment, is your right to self-defense — which inheres as a matter of physiology in all organisms — and while you need not understand it to effect it, if you effect it by talking about it rather than by acting upon it your chances of survival are grim.
The argument you make here for rights is appropriate to economics, but not to law, IMO. In law, I would use the word “right” as short-hand for a potentially-judicable claim. A right in that context has no reality in physics, physiology or ontology, but it is plausibly something that a very high proportion of a given population (say, 99.9+%) might want to observe as social lubrication when disputes arise. As much as we might sputter about our rights, most of us know that violence tends to result in greater violence, so we are most likely to pursue alternatives to armed conflict when disputes arise. Virtually all disputes are resolved this way, with only the smallest number of them even rising (sinking?) to the level of adjudication.
But: If someone were running transportation lines on or under my land, would I have a judicable claim? Hard to deny. So it follows that I might well have a judicable claim for transportation lines running over my land.
Moreover, there could be other tenable claims. If I were to mount speakers next to your property, producing a simulation of the the sound of a helicopter at 1,500 feet, you would have a plausible judicable claim that I am interfering with your right to quiet enjoyment of your home. I might also be spooking the livestock or scaring off the game, both also arguably material injuries. There is no reason not to apply the same reasoning to an actual helicopter.
What might be plausible counter-claims? A passenger jet at 30,000 feet might well be trespassing, but my ability to demonstrate any sort of material injury is pretty thin. Moreover, by now, airlines could simply argue that whatever property rights I might have had at essentially-inaudible heights have long since been abandoned — Locke v. Blackstone.
Even so, there is no reason to dismiss potentially-judicable torts simply because we swept them aside in the past. The jury is still out on damage potentially done by electromagnetic waves on human brain tissue, for example. An injury is an injury no matter when it is discovered.
None of this matters in the context of your post, so I apologize for running off on a tangent. But the question is interesting for this reason: If we imagine a population of truly free people, we should expect that they would be zealous and jealous in the defense of their property rights. It’s a shame the Americans of the early twentieth century were not.
October 9, 2009 — 11:49 am