Day 3 of “The Blogopshere vs. the FTC” brings us the full set of guidelines, and wow are they head spinning.

I really don’t want to blog daily on this whole Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guideline debacle, but it just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

First off, I finally got a link to the full 81-page document (PDF link) from Steven Hodson, and although I have only read through 51 pages thus far, this is going to be mandatory reading for every independent blogger if you want to make sure to keep yourself from getting in trouble with the FTC.  That being said, be prepared for the extreme ambiguity of the document on many fronts.

So far I have still yet to find anywhere that describes in detail how disclosures are supposed to be written.  It mentions numerous times that you must disclose if you receive a product for free and then give it a positive review (there is some implication that disclosure is not required on negative reviews), but nowhere does it say how are exactly where it is to be placed.

The document also discusses new rules for celebrity endorsements and how they are supposed to disclose their relationship with anything they speak positively of.  The problem with this is that at no time do they define what a celebrity is.  On tonight’s episode of CobWEBs, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I discussed this, and technically you could call iJustine a celebrity, but that is only to a handful of people on the Internet.  Heck, there was even a time when I was working for Wizard magazine that I was being asked for my autograph on a regular basis, would that have qualified me as a celebrity?  I was a celebrity to those people, but not to the other 99.999999999% of the population of the country, but would I have qualified for the FTC celebrity rules?  Who knows, their answers are so vague.

Then to muddy the waters even further, Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC (and someone Rizzn has been trying to get an interview with for 3 months with no luck) spoke with FastCompany, and made some of the most mind boggling statements ever.

Heather B. Armstrong, author of parenting blog Dooce: “Eleven thousand dollars is a little crazy for a post. Maybe I’m being naïve, but I think a lot of people who are in violation [of not disclosing] just don’t know that they’re supposed to.”

Richard Cleland: “That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law…

Excuse me?  When did the FTC start writing laws?  They are a regulatory body, they are not capable of making “laws”.  Perhaps he was misquoted, but if the FTC really sees this as “law”, we’re in bigger trouble than any of us first thought.

Brian Lam, editorial director of Gizmodo: “Some colleagues of mine just reminded me of how many freelance pro journalists take junkets. In the end, I’m glad these rules are being introduced, but it’s kind of stupid to attach unethical behavior to a particular publishing medium. Look at how shitty TV journalism can be, by and large.”

RC: “It’s not the medium, it’s the message. We want to establish a self-imposed ethical standard so people are aware of the conflicts of interest…

“We want to establish a self-imposed…” um … which part of this sentence makes any sense?  How does person #2 establish SELF-IMPOSED anything on person #1?

This is what we are dealing with folks: vagueness, ambiguity and a regulatory body that seems to have no clue what its actual job is.  If you aren’t scared yet, you aren’t thinking.