From Rick Hasen's blog: My own take on what is happening at the FEC: the commissioners are likely looking for a compromise that would garner a majority vote on the Commission and be upheld against an inevitable court challenge no matter what the FEC does. This is a tall task. This is likely to be the most salient action of the FEC since its summer 2004 decision not to regulate 527s as political committees during that election. The commissioners are in a tough spot. If they do very little (such as simply regulating paid ads and spam, as the Skeptic has suggested in Seussian poetry), the reform community will go back to Judge Kollar-Kotelly and complain that the Commission still has not done its job---only now the schedule will have to be expedited to deal with the upcoming 2006 elections. And if they do little, they can expect a flood of complaints filed against political websites arguing that they need to register as a political committee. If they do more, and set forth detailed rules, including rules on who gets the "media exemption," they are going to have to make some important and tough value choices. It may be hard to get at least 4 commissioners to agree on the precise contours of the rules that should be put in place.