BREAKING: FEC 6-0 on not regulating blogs

Sounds like a good decision to me.  Not sure how else they could have viewed it though.

The link is here.

WASHINGTON - The Federal Election Commission decided Monday to exempt virtually all political activity on the Internet from the nation's new campaign finance law.

In a 6-0 vote, the commission decided to regulate only paid political ads placed on another person's Web site.

The decision means that bloggers and online publications will not be covered by provisions of the new election law. Internet bloggers and individuals will therefore be able to use the Internet to attack or support federal candidates without running afoul of campaign spending limits.

The thing that may be restricted, though, are ads

The FEC noted the difference between paid advertising and political blogs: “individuals can build blogs and other websites for free, an individual can communicate with the general public at little or no cost. However, this is not true in the case of paid advertising on another person’s website.” One of the bloggers who addressed the FEC recommended that the FEC create a threshold value to exclude low-cost PPC ads from regulation, citing costs of ads ranging from $10-$20 per week through BlogAds.com. But the FEC also regulates other low-cost ads like late-night radio ads and classifieds in small-circulation papers, and decided not to make an exception.

Update: Jennifer gave me a link to Atrios with a lot more detail on this subject.