Who wants to pay $11,000 ?

             What really is a blog? Is its best definition that of a genre, or of a medium, or maybe, as MOBYLIVES claims, it is purely “a place where people talk”. According to the FTC, a blog is just another form of media, one that is used to advertise and sell products.

First, some background information: ‘FTC’ stands for Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov/ftc/about.shtm). The agency was formed with the purpose of regulating trade by passing laws that would prevent the success of big monopolies… an original ‘trust-buster’. The catchphrase on their website reads “Protecting America’s Consumers”, something which they may be trying too hard to do. In October 2009, the FTC announced that it was going to “revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980” . The regulations went into affect December 1, 2009, and anyone caught withholding information on their transactions will receive anywhere between a warning letter and a fine of $11,000, depending on each individual case. 

If the internet is as the new FTC guidelines suppose, it is a medium rampant with hidden advertising and ploys to undermine consumers’ trust in whose web pages they read. While to some extent the agency’s dedication via this new focus on the spread of awareness about whether a highly lauding review of a product is genuine or due to a bribe given by companies hungry for more buyers’ money is admirable and definitely worth consideration, the FTC is assuming that there is only one answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a blog?’.

The presumption that blogs and bloggers are in some way or another attempting to advertise something suggests that there is a less free future in store for the blogging world. Choire Sicha (who has her own blog TheAwl) wrote in a NY Times article: 

“Now that we are all on Facebook, we are each a sole proprietor. We are all perpetrators and victims of promotion (for the most part that promotion is tediously of the “self” variety). That every consumer is now a retailer is capitalism’s ultimate and most logical evolution.”

This proposition gives a whole new look at the way that the Federal Trade Commission wants to regulate blogging. On Facebook, users are asked to provide information about themselves: what they’re looking for [i.e. friendship, dating, a relationship, networking], their favorite books, movies, activities, etc. People are given the opportunity and encouraged to make themselves sound appealing and interesting to other people. It lets people sell themselves. Yet to bring up the argument made by MOBYLIVES [and Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine blog which they quote suggests that people don’t see what they are doing as advertising. When I log into Facebook or Tumblr, I never think that I’m going contributing to a media. It’s all about sharing and connecting with people over common threads… the only profit I’m making is the one that comes from interaction with other people.

Whether you consider blogs the way Choire Sicha proposes them, as medium in which everyone is advertising something, even if it is only themselves, or how MOBYLIVES portrays them, a place where people are there just “connecting” and “talking” (which also relates to how Paul Grobstein thinks of “b-ing”… as chatter), the new regulations have a possibility of taking things too far. When does the protection of a consumer actually start to infringe upon their freedom to blog about whatever they choose without fear of repercussion? If things keep heading in the direction they’re going, how much longer is it until every internet user has to pay?