Now Regulated by the FTC

The other day I came across a passing mention of some FTC plan to fine book bloggers $11,000 if they positively review books they get from publishers without mentioning that they got them from publishers, and I sort of ignored it, because it seemed too ridiculous to be true.

PhiloBiblios, however, reports today on changes to FTC rules about advertising and commercial speech that appear to suggest that while fines in the thousands of dollars are not exactly on the table, endorsements of books received for free might become problematic in the very near future.

Sound insane? Yes. The regulations are primarily aimed at stuff like Marie Osmond saying she lost one frillion pounds on NutraSystem and making sure that ordinary consumers watching the ad don't also believe that they will lose one frillion pounds. (This is why all those diet/home gym/workout video ads say "results not typical" at the bottom in tiny print.) It's also meant to prevent a company from setting up a blog posing as Joe Q. Unaffiliated Random Citizen Who Thinks Company X Fucking Rocks and saying only awesome things about their products - Joe Q could become an influential internet celebrity and people might think that his opinion is totally unbiased, when in fact it's just the PR department of Company X, lying through its collective teeth. (Whether or not this is actually a good or helpful thing is a topic for another post on someone else's blog, but that's how we've chosen to roll, at this point.)

Still, evidently - my brain shut off about 12 pages into the 81 page review of comments that PhiloBiblios links to - the language can be read in such a way that the FTC may well wind up regulating what I have to say about books I get through LT's Early Reviewers program, and that makes me itchy. (Y'all, the review of comments is so boring. I do this for a living, on and off, and it makes my eyes glaze over.) I usually do give a little backstory about a book and why I'm writing about it here, I think, whether it came from the library or was a gift or how I got interested in the author or whatever, but I'm not wild about the suggestion that I might have to do that, nor about the suggestion that the publishers who so generously provide free books to LibraryThing for the Early Reviewers program might be subject to some kind of legal action for deceptive practices because I write up a book here and forget to mention that I got it from them.

In a way, though, this is a really interesting problem, because it exposes some ways in which our methods for dealing with problems in the past can be inadequate to an age characterized by instant, widespread, and ever-evolving methods of communication. This doesn't mean that either the system or the changes are bad things, it just means that it's becoming ever more important to think creatively, strategically, and broadly about potential solutions to real problems, and to the consequences of those solutions, both intended and unintended. Does the FTC (or anyone else in the world, for that matter) really care about book bloggers enough to fine or prosecute them? My guess is no. But just because the FTC doesn't care about a group doesn't mean that it can't be negatively affected by new regulations, and that possibility has to be part of the calculus any agency engages in when they set about to change rules to better address current problems.