San Francisco May Regulate Blogging
by on April 4th, 2005 
7 Comments
Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and 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.
This is ridiculous and unenforceable. Not only will they be required to register, but if blogs in San Francisco mention candidates for local office and receive more than 500 hits they will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits.
Thanks Blogtyme for the heads up.
The bill only applies to election-related blogs, not everyone’s blog. Read the bill/article/law/whatever before posting over-zealous hype, please :) The very first page of the PDF that BlogTyme links to (well, the very first page full of text, anyways) specifies that the bill and everything within it are specific to “electioneering communications” within the media specified in the bill – blogging is being added to it because it has been previously in the gray area. It already applies to radio, television, advertising, and traditional media.
After going through the city ordinance, I don’t really see anything in it that talks about bloggers having to report anything. It sounds more like the candidate that requests being posted on a blog has to report it. It mentions the internet, but that probably means a site like johnkerry.com.
The guy who you got the info from seemed to be misquoting the ordinance, and certainly made it more confusing than the ordinance. Though, the ordinance is certainly confusing in it’s own right.