Blogs scare the MBAs witless. Blogs out branding, they out attempts to use language to hide the truth, they out the con artists and the fakirs who can push a stock price into a bubble by gutting the employees's benefits without doing anything to get product out the door. The blogs scare the ownership society. They force them to confront the customers face on without the protection of their spin meisters and closed door meet-and-greets. They can co-opt blogs, but they can't change the essential openness. Vampires don't like bay windows on their crypts.

The Committee on Electoral Matters will end up self-motivated to regulate the internet, no matter how impossible. Politicians - of all stripes - try to control the message, and this is best done through a centralised media. The internet is a great threat to the control of their careful narratives, stories and messages. So whether getup existed or not, I suspect the same outcome will occur, it just would have used the existing justification which was johnhowardlies.com.