Overlawyered.com:  Walter Olson worries about the chilling effect the new FTC ad rule will have on people and the FTC’s selective enforcement of the regulation.  I agree.

An editorial in today’s

[October 12, 2009] New York Times, despite a bit of concessionary fluff about not wanting ‘to hamstring the ability of bloggers and twitterers to report and comment about the world,’ enthusiastically endorses the new rules.  It says not one word about the dangers of overbreadth, de minimis triviality, chilling effects, or selective enforcement.  Nor (unlike the L.A. Times’s far more nuanced editorial) does it inform readers that the FTC is proposing in some respects to regulate social media more stringently than traditional media outlets such as the Times itself.