The outcry over the USA's FEC and its attempts to regulate blogs reminds me of nothing more than the censorship attempts of regimes such as communist China or intolerant Saudi Arabia to stop their citizens from reading stuff that annoys the government in question. But in all the discussion, one thing that I haven't really seen covered is the proposed global reach of these rules. When the first report came out the Junkyardblog pointed out that foreigners, such as this blog, comment on American politics as do Americans living abroad, and wondered just how the FEC proposed to enforce its proposed censorship in these cases.
Well originally I assmed I was sitting pretty - although my current hosting provider is in California it would be easy to move it - and indeed one of the UK libertarians at Samizdata proposed setting up an offshore site specifically to work around the FEC in this way. However as I think about it so more I'm not so sure.
The UK (for example) is quite willing to hear libel cases about online US publications and quite willing to find people guilty of defamation when they post anonymously. Given that the US courts are willing to at least listen to the complaints of Russian oil company Yukos and its tussle with the Russian government even if they later decided not to do anything, I see absolutely no reason why they would not hear a case brought by the FEC against foreign bloggers. Indeed seeing as how the US gets all worked up about foreign contributions to political campaigns I can imagine the FEC being even more stringent about foreign blogs. Of course I'm not quite sure how they would actually manage to shut us down but I imagine they could so so if they wanted to, after all the RIAA and MPAA have managed to shut down non-US filesharers and the like.