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What follows is a transcript of the introductory portion, of the Internet Advisory Caucus' panel on the FEC's rulemaking process. McCain-Feingold in Cyberspace.

This transcript portion includes remarks by moderator Mike Cornfield of the Pew Internet & American life Project. A full index of panel transcripts is available here.

DY: This is the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee event:  "McCain-Feingold In Cyberspace:  How Much Should Bloggers and the Internet be Regulated?"

We host this event in conjunction with the Internet Caucus and its co-chairs:  Senators Conrad Burns, Patrick Leahy; Congressmen Goodlatte, Boucher, and Wireless Chair Congressman Honda.  Um, I'd like to go ahead and introduce our moderator, Michael Cornfield, consultant for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  He's an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management.  He also wrote a book, Politics Moves Online, as well as he writes a monthly column for Campaigns and Elections.  Um, he's going to go ahead and introduce our panelists, it'll be followed by a short panel discussion, and then we'll have an audience question-and-answer session.  So I'll go ahead and introduce Michael Cornfield.

MC:  Thank you, Danielle, and good afternoon everyone.  Let me briefly introduce my co-panelists, then I'll have an introductory statement to sort of put this discussion in what I hope will be an intelligent context.  Then I'm going to ask the panelists to talk for about five minutes each, then I'll open up the discussion with a couple of questions, and then we will very rapidly open it up to, our audience.  And I hope we will have a microphone by that time.  In the event that we do not, I may reserve the right to paraphrase your questions, so that everyone watching on television and listening through Podcasts and whatever other technologies we're going to be using today, uh, will be able to follow the dialogue.  

To my immediate left is Scott Thomas, who is Chairman of the Federal Election Commission.  To his left, in the center - insert joke here - is Mike Krempasky of RedState.org, who is also the co-founder of the Online Coalition, and maintains Rathergate.com, NotSpecter.com, and ConfirmThem.com in addition to his, "anchor" website, I believe, RedState.org.  And, on the extreme left of the panel is John Morris, who is the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Internet Standards Technology and Policy Project.

Very well, then.  We discuss today a topic in which most, if not all, of the key terms are loaded with multiple meanings which are sometimes contradictory and sometimes controversial.  Any regulatory or legislative action that may be taken as a result of the revision process the D.C. District Court has ordered with respect the internet and campaign finance will have to set out definitions of these key terms.  Officials, campaigners, journalists and citizens will struggle to understand these definitions, and lawyers will charge high fees to purport to explain them.  Welcome to a "semantic Midway."  Here's the "Public Communication Hall of Mirrors."  There's the "Media Exemption Merry-go-round."  And down at the end of the Midway are the "Threshold Throw-up Rides."

The biggest hubbub seems to be around the "Blogger Tent."  And if we get into a discussion of the word blog, "...what is a blog...," we may not get any further.  So let me start instead, and orient my remarks, around the term "mainstream media."  It's a term that bloggers are fond of using when they are putting themselves in a heroic light.  Sometimes it's abbreviated as "MSM."  The MSM, or mainstream media, has become a punching-bag term for old or mass-media organizations which distribute content via television, radio, newspapers and magazines.  For some reason, movies and music belong to a different category, which is known as "Hollywood."  The mainstream media connotes conventional wisdom, liberal bias, corporate control, irrational bureaucracy, sensationalist drivel, and endlessly-repeated oversimplifications.  Well, sure enough.

But guess what?  The mainstream media use the internet, too!  And internet user numbers have reached mainstream proportions.  According to our latest Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, completed ten days ago on March 21st, there are now 136 million Americans who use the internet.  Excuse me, adults who use the internet.  That's 67%, two out of every three, Americans above the age of 18.  By the way, in the 12-17 year old age group, 87% of them use the Internet.  There are another 13 million adults who do not use the Internet, but live in a household with an Internet connection.  Of that 136 million, in the adult U.S. online population, just over half -- about 75 million -- turned to the Internet in the 2004 campaign cycle.  The numbers I cite now come from a March report on the campaign, uh, and the Internet, which is available at PewInternet.org.

Of that 75 million who used the Internet in connection to the campaign, 63 million used it to obtain news and information.  That's an 83% increase from the 34 million who used it in 2000.  63 million people is a mainstream audience if ever there was one.  Demographically, this online audience continues to take on more characteristics of the general adult population.  There are more women.  In fact, the gap between women and men has closed completely with respect to Internet use.  There are more older Americans.  There are more rural residents.  There are more English-speaking Hispanics.  There are more African-Americans.  There are more middle- and lower-income households who have joined the `early adopters.'  So, the population using the Internet is "mainstreaming" in that sense of the term.

As a primary news source, the Internet still trails television by a wide margin.  Television is still the main medium people use to follow the campaigns and elections.  But the Internet has closed the gap on radio and newspapers, especially for the 27% of the U.S. population who have `broadband' - high speed, high volume connections to the Internet.  The websites of major news organizations attracted the most members of the online politics audience.  Online portals such as AOL and Yahoo!, which mainly repackage mainstream news, were the second most popular source.  

But now, the application of the term mainstream media to the Internet starts to get a little wobbly.  Because the Internet audience encounters a broader range of campaign-relevant information than just news as journalists define it, and ads as politicians pay for them.  34 million Internet users sought candidate positions on issues at specialized websites, such as candidate websites, or websites maintained by parties or advocacy groups.  31 million followed opinion polls.  14 million looked for information on how to register to vote and where to vote.  32 million looked at jokes.  19 million looked at video clips.  And we have no number on how many people looked at rumors and fabrications with respect the campaigns, but we do know that 25 million Americans told us that they checked the accuracy of claims made by or about the candidates on the Internet.  So, in effect, tens of millions of Americans in 2004 used the Internet to assemble their own voter guides.  Millions of Americans also bumped into political news and information while browsing the web or looking for other types of information.  In fact, over 30 million, fully half of the 63 million, did that.  

Now, there is another sense in which the term mainstream media, while it applies in some respects to the Internet, does not apply to the Internet.  Because on the Internet, unique among the mainstream media, information moves upstream as well as downstream.  In fact, it also moves outwards into a "wetlands," which may need special protection, because it constitutes that most precious of social environments, a public space.

Let's turn to email.  More than 43 million Americans said they participated in an email conversation about the 2004 elections.  That 43 million overlaps with the 63 million in the audience, but not entirely.  There were some Americans who didn't use the Internet to go get news and information but exchanged emails about the election.  An email can be casual; it can also be very intentional.  Friends and colleagues can connect, a campaign representative can enter the email dialogue, and suddenly a member of a mainstream audience can be turned into an activist.  Can email carry ads?  Of course it can.  Can email be sent for a price?  Of course it can.  Can email be coordinated with campaigns?  Of course it can.  So email, as well as websites, are implicated in our definitions of what constitutes the Internet with respect to campaign finance laws and regulations.  

Fourteen percent (14%) of the entire U.S. adult population got political email between Labor Day and Election Day.  That's a lot.  Now, it's not as much as got direct mail - half of America got direct mail about the election in September and October of 2004, and 40% got telephone calls - but those numbers will change, and they will blur.  Already, Americans exchange email at nine times the volume of postal mail.  And perhaps you've heard of VoIP, Voice Over Internet Protocol.  So email, like the use of the web, is going to become more and more political as the years go by.

Final introductory point:  At a time of sharp and rising dissatisfaction with the mainstream media in its coverage and treatment of politics, the internet stands out as a plus, on both a social and a personal level.  By a 10 to 1 margin, 49% to 5%, the Internet users we interviewed judged the Internet to be a positive addition to public debate on the 2004 campaign.  The remainder said it made little difference, or didn't know.  Seventy percent (70%) of the online political news and information consumers said they found what they were looking for about the campaigns always or most of the time.  Now, can you imagine comparable numbers of satisfaction for television, or for newspapers, or for direct mail?  I don't think so.  

The Internet, today at least, is the "good" medium for politics.  Which is not to say there are not problems with it.  There are, and we will get to them.  But, our best guess is, right now, the Internet as a medium for politics is not "broken."  And so, I'm going to ask Chairman Thomas to explain to us why his Commission has been obligated to "fix" it.