Worse yet, the Bush Administration has clearly not thought through the implications of the sort of "payola" scheme being advanced by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
North Carolina Treasurer Richard Moore held a press conference Friday in a bid to limit damage after a Forbes story (see "Pensions, Pols, Payola") garnered a lot of unwanted scrutiny.
The ProPublica report does not distinguish between rare private payments for genuinely pernicious activities--like payola, which is already a serious crime--and those that finance crucial activities, like education and laboratory work.
When the payola scandals of the late '50s engulfed the music industry -- DJs and music business types were given bribes to play certain records -- both Freed and Clark were subjects of scrutiny.
"Internet payola, " he called it. (Verizon and Google denied they were making such a deal.) "Blocking is the same thing as censorship, " says Wu, a Harvard law grad who studied under open- Internet evangelist Lawrence Lessig.