Bill Powers Discusses FEC Draft Opinion on Gmail

Bill Powers was quoted in the Inc. magazine article “Google Just Got Some Good News About Its Plans for Gmail, But a Lot of Users Might Be Disappointed.” The article examines the potential impact of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) draft advisory opinion suggesting potential changes Google could make to Gmail and spam — changes that the numerous Gmail users have pushed back on.

The proposed changes would allow political emails from FEC registered political committees to be exempted from “forms of spam detection to which they would otherwise be subject” and routed to users’ inboxes.

The draft opinion will be voted on by the six FEC commissioners — and predicting how they will vote is difficult.

Commenting on the issue, Bill said, “It's possible that they discuss it and they split; it could be a 3-to-3 vote, and no opinion gets issued…Or they could have their discussion, and it appears they find common ground, and they instruct the office of general counsel to draft something along the lines of the discussion. We don't know what will happen.”