About Joel's second point: Why would Google/Facebook give free ads only for U.S. politicians? If they start with that, shouldn't they do that for every other country as well? Sure for the moment nominally their HQs are in the U.S. but they are multinational corporations, with huge HQs in Ireland and several other countries as well.
Yep. To me, it's one of those issues where opening the floodgates to free one-sided political ads should result in an investigation (EU-style). A business with such dominant platforms shouldn't be pushing political agendas (on said platforms), even if we agree with them.
That applies equally to other services from Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Comcast, Time Warner, BSkyB, Virgin Media etc.
