Cyberspace changing the rules of the electrical game

The good news is that Republic Act 9006, or the Fair Elections Act, is out. The bad news is that it has little to say, if at all, about election campaigns in cyberspace. (Okay, that last point really depends on whose point of view we’re talking about.)

Just the same, with the May 2001 elections fast approaching, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is meeting with representatives of telecommunication firms and Internet service providers (ISPs) to discuss the possibility of regulating the use of new technologies like cyberspace and mobile phone short messaging service (SMS) or "texting" in the elections.

"While the law is silent, (the) Comelec, from my own perspective, should recommend a regulation on the use of (these technologies)," Comelec Commissioner Resurreccion Borra said.

Pundits wonder whether the poll body – already saddled with a host of problems such as the worrisome fact that it has yet to receive a P1.9-billion supplemental budget for additional election and operational expenses – has the time and the resources to do just that.

Impossible dream

"It’s both a technical and a practical impossibility," said Gilbert Lumantao, 32, who heads a team of researchers for the Information Technology Law program of the University of the Philippines’ Institute of International Legal Studies. Well, in a country where many people, particularly those in the rural areas, don’t even know what a first-generation personal computer looks like, it really sounds like a lot of wistful thinking.

He said the proposal is sure to get flak from free speech advocates, who look at the Internet as the last frontier of freedom. "It’s difficult in the first place to review all the content found in the Internet," he said, "plus the fact that there is always a thin line separating political advertising and sheer political statement."

"Even in the United States, courts have yet to lay down the rules of the game," said Solomon Lumba, 31, a senior law student at the UP College of Law who is writing a research paper on campaign contribution reforms.

Indeed, cyberspace, as is often the case with technology, is changing the way we do things so fast that our laws can’t keep up with it.

But what’s bad news for the Comelec should be good news for politicians, if only they realize just what they can do with the Internet. Since there are no rules yet, they can, for example, put up a campaign site long before the official campaign period starts – and get away with it. It is even doubtful if the Comelec has the technological expertise to monitor just about every website that carries political advertising.

And yet, politicians have yet to realize the full potentials of the Internet to reach voters and advance their political agenda. One indication that this is so is that while the House of Representatives has put up its own website, it’s largely empty but for the roster of its honorable members, according to Lumantao.

He said members of Congress are missing a big opportunity to reach out to a large chunk of their constituents – the youth – by not maximizing their use of the Internet. "They don’t realize that these days, many of the country’s voters belong to the 18 to 35 age bracket," he said, "the same age bracket to which many of our Internet users belong."

"The Senate is even worse," Lumantao said. "It has no official website yet." For now, it is largely an individual initiative on the part of a handful of new media-savvy legislators.

Meanwhile, activists lord it over the Internet. Quick to master the language of the new technology, activists made their presence felt in cyberspace as they launched their respective cyber-campaigns to oust then President Joseph Estrada from power. Lumantao cited the example of Vicente "Enteng" Romano III’s www.elagda.com, which started out as a petition-letter campaign asking for Estrada’s immediate resignation. In a short time, it has drawn over 100,000 members from across the country and elsewhere, brought together by a common cause.

Now that Estrada is gone, Romano is receiving suggestions from members to transform the site into a forum for other raging political issues of the day. We don’t know yet what shape the new advocacy will take. "On this site," the webmaster has posted, "will rise a new eLagda website dedicated to protecting the gains of EDSA II."

"It is still evolving," according to Lumantao, "and this is very characteristic of the new medium."

Campaign notes

Election spending is a big issue these days. In Germany, Lumba noted, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to resign as head of the Christian Democratic Union, the country’s dominant political party, in connection with the Spendenaffare, Germany’s biggest postwar political scandal. He is facing criminal investigation over charges that he received illegal campaign contributions from oil companies worth millions of dollars.

Here in the Philippines, Congress recently passed the Fair Elections Act in response to the furor that raged in the wake of the passage of Republic Act 6646, notoriously known as the Political Ad Ban, which prohibited mass media from selling or donating media space to candidates. The new law, Lumba said, represents a "middle way" between the excesses of regulation and deregulation. "A very rich candidate, for example, cannot outspend his rival since he is given only a finite amount of radio and television time and print space during the campaign period," he said.

The poorer candidates, meanwhile, can avail themselves of free campaign space Comelec is mandated to buy from three national television networks and three national radio networks. Bona fide candidates and registered political parties will also find helpful a schedule of discounted rates for advertising in mass media, ranging from 30 percent for television, to 20 percent for radio and 10 percent for print.

But what of political advertising in cyberspace? "The language of the law seems to contemplate only the use of the mass media – radio, television and newspapers," Lumba said. "We don’t even know yet if regulation also applies to say, the online versions of newspapers or television stations."

For him, the Internet is a cost-effective medium of political advertising. "In fact, in the United States, political parties consider it a virtually cost-free affair," Lumba said. This is because anybody with the minimum of technical know-how can put up a website. "These days, even a nine-year-old can do that."

Besides, the Internet is a huge mine of entities which offer surfers free web-hosting space.

"How do you check up on all these sites?" he asked. Moreover, the Internet defies time. Put up a site and leave it there. It will stay there for as long as the free web-hosting site remains. A deist’s heaven, we might say. And very unlike campaign posters, which disintegrate under the rain and the sun. Or the 30-second television and radio spots, which only last as long as the budget will allow. So, shall we then allow a thousand political websites to bloom?