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In an announcement that came out yesterday the FTC plans to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. It sounds ominous, and it is. Now the Federal Trade Commission wants in too. Suspicious that someone might be making money with a blog rather than freely expressing themselves, new regulations are about to go into effect. If there was a referendum about it, or if it was part of Obama’s platform, it wasn’t widely publicised. It’s a pandora’s box that has censorship of a poisonous flavor spilling out of it. The increased red tape may prevent casual bloggers who do it for free and for fun from speaking.Posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer, and getting commissions would be enough to trigger oversight. The problem is that millions of affiliate ads are placed, and very few of them ever return anything. That is what advertisers are counting on, millions of free ads. Most blogs are running in the red, and most writers are not making anything for the ads.
In one article it is claimed that “many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all… Such bloggers are paid as much as $3,000 for a 200-word post.”
Who are those people? If your company is out there and you have a product or service you want me to review I’ll do it. If you are going to pay or give out products lets go. But that rarely ever happens. The biggest always get the best, and indie publications, even tht large ones get whatever is left, if anything. It is those (us) writers that you can put your trust in because they have little or nothing to gain. Some are talking about their passion, with no reward except for the expression in of itself.
So who are these bloggers that the FTC will be going after? Perhaps at one time websites were paying writers money comparable to what magazines were paying. But now every out of work Joe who just got laid off has a blog. Magazines have been closing down and going out of business over the past three years like rats jumping from a buring boat. Websites that were monetized have a very short life span if at all, and the best of them, frankly, get absorbed into big conglomerates. In the games industry this is even more the case.
A trend of marketing exposure has continued to take away the freedom to express yourself through an online persona. On Amazon.com unless you have a credit card, and have made purchases you can’t make a comment. University students are routinely given email accounts using their last names. Facebook insists that you use your real name, include your location, and where you went to school. There are few check boxes for creative jobs, self employed or unemployed. And if they don’t like the name you use, they can delete your account. You can’t delete your own Facebook account, you can only deactivate it. They hold the rights to everything you posted, eternally. All of these insidious little tweaks that you see around the net have increased to demand that you divulge your identity, your whereabouts and your income at all times. It has gone way beyond the cookies that only tracked you and stored information. It has become full blown marketers mayhem which controls everything.
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