I read critiques of the FTC’s new guidelines on bloggers’ disclosure of material interests online by Jeff Jarvis, Reason Magazine, and Dan Gillmor. All three tried to convince me that the new regulations are dangerous, but I’m not entirely persuaded.

I’ll go through the arguments of Jarvis and Gillmor below. Reason’s post makes mostly similar arguments, except in one spot where they clearly misread the rules — the first commenter on their post points out the error.

Why Jarvis and Gillmor? Only because I happen to follow them on Twitter. They’re arbitrary, not exemplary. Have you found stronger arguments? Share in the comments.

Jarvis

First, Pay Per Post et al, as I realized late to the game, are not aimed at fooling consumers. Who would read the boring, sycophantic drivel its people write? No, they are aimed at fooling Google and its algorithms. It’s human spam. And it’s Google’s job to regulate that.

Pay Per Post may not be aiming to fool consumers, but what if it does? I don’t know who would read “sycophantic drivel” apparently any more than Jarvis does but I’m more sure that not everybody knows their way around Pay Per Post and its ilk as well as he might. Are those people deserving of more protection?

Surely it’s not Google’s job to regulate whether a reader has an adequate understanding of the Web, nor is it their job to highlight those parts of the Web which can harm individuals. It would be nice for them to do so, but it’s not a requirement, so far as I know.

Second, the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

I confess to having thought of the Internet as a medium until I read this paragraph. I’m now reconsidering that assumption. But even if we assume the Internet is not a medium, I don’t think it follows that the FTC’s “going after” bloggers is equivalent to the government goon listening in at Denny’s.

In Denny’s, the only people privy to my conversation about Uncle Vinnie are the people I’m talking to, and maybe someone who happens to walk by at the right time, or the people in the table next to me. Regardless, in a face-to-face conversation, there is likely to be a relationship between the speakers, where Person A already knows that Person B’s uncle owns the pizzeria that Person B hawks.

There’s no need for disclosure here – in the context of the conversation, there is less chance that Person B is trying to harm Person A, or that Person A can’t ask enough questions of Person B to figure out B’s relationship with Vinnie.

Contrast the Denny’s conversation with a blog post I make about my uncle’s pizzeria (if my uncle had one, that is). While regular readers or friends might know who my uncle is, someone searching “Columbia MO pizza” does not. Isn’t that person deserving of a warning?

The time element is also important. My conversation at Denny’s exists only for as long as the sound emits.My blog post about pizza is, or at least could be, around for a long time. There’s no guarantee I’ll keep checking back on the post, or that I’ll keep blogging. Two years from now, isn’t someone who stumbles on an isolated post deserving of the proper context?

How much do I have disclose?…And what about automated ads, such as those from Google?

I share these concerns. I suggest reading those paragraphs in Jarvis’ post to understand fully the situations that may come up.

And there is the greatest myth embedded within the FTC’s rules: that the government can and should sanitize the internet for our protection. The internet is the world and the world is messy and I don’t want anyone – not the government, not a newspaper editor – to clean it up for me, for I fear what will go out in the garbage: namely, my rights.

Your right to…? And what about the rights of others? Which rights are promoted and which are muted?

Gillmor

The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same.

Sadly, this theme is not picked up again in the rest of the post, so I don’t know what to make of it. In itself, the sentence doesn’t really mean anything. Perhaps he’s trying to make a similar point to what Jarvis did above.

I’ve posted a number of Twitter tweets about Android, including my preference for that environment than Apple’s restricted system. Where, exactly — in a post with a total length of 140 characters — should the disclosure go?

If the FTC were to regulate that disclosure should fall in the same tweet as the original message, then I agree, we have a problem. It’s not clear whether that’s the case. Edward Champion suggests (in update 2) that the FTC may be OK with disclosure in a separate tweet, which is an annoyance, but I think palatable. One would hope, though, that simply listing disclosures on an “about me” page somewhere, linked to from your Twitter profile, would be sufficient.

[W]hat about the extremely common practices of traditional media? Every news organization covering technology gets freebies by the container-load. Book reviewers’ offices overflow with volumes sent by publishers. Subsidized or even complimentary travel, food and other things of this sort are common but too-rarely disclosed.

Fair enough. This point alludes to one part of the new regulations I found confusing: How the FTC determined who a “reasonable” consumer is. From my interpretation, one reason traditional media were excluded from the new rules is that a reasonable reader would know that the newspaper received the product from the company. Oh? I can’t think of a reason why that may or may not be the case.

Regardless, the point Gillmor makes (Jarvis made it too) doesn’t really address whether the new rules are right. In fact, it almost seems by his argument that, were newspapers included under the regulations, then the regulations would thereby become more legitimate, which I don’t think he wants to argue.

We already have laws against fraud. Let’s enforce those — first against the serious fraudsters, who keep getting away with it — before we even consider harsh regulations on speech.

I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not that he’s wrong, but I need to know something about the rules against fraud and how they’re applicable to the current situation before understanding this reason.

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After I finished typing the above, I found Robert Quigley’s arguments on important ambiguities in the regulations. With a dash of humor, to boot. I think most of what he says has merit.

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