EQUTE — The uproar over flogs or fake blogs continues, but who is really responsible for them?

I liken the current Federal Trade Commission crackdown and all out Oprah war on flogs to the banking crisis. Both bring up the question of where is the regulation and who should be doing the regulating?

All along the way from the fake blog to the CPA action, people could have stopped and said, “Well, this doesn’t seem right, maybe I should stop.”

The affiliate marketing writer cold police him or herself, but when it’s a matter of livelihood, are they really going to stop when their storefront site is getting hammered by Lucy’s Juicy Diet and Wally’s White Teeth? Adding pressure to make more commissions from affiliate managers also pushes them to follow the path that works. Sure, one could ask if everyone were jumping off a cliff, would you? Affiliates would likely answer, “Sure, if we’re landing in a big pile of money.”

Then there is the networks, they might throw a line or two into their 40-page terms of service about fake blogs and trademarks. But beyond that, they don’t have the time or resources to wonder where each link is coming from — especially if that link is bringing in money for them and their advertisers. Adding regulation at this point seems logical until you think about how many thousands of new landing pages pop up every day for everything from acai berries, Obama grants, Google money, teeth whitening and all the rest. Unlike entities like Facebook, affiliate networks aren’t going to set up an expensive lander submittal process that would only succeed in making them less money.

Then there is the advertiser, the one visible person that gets a negative image in the eyes of the consumer if they catch on that what they’re reading is a flog. Some advertisers have sought out flogs and stopped them, but more often than not, even the advertiser isn’t going to be eager to cut themselves out of the profit. Perhaps they could send that free trial offer to reviewers and bloggers — which some do — but that means more overhead and putting a lot of trust in the blogger’s hands. If they are hawking acai berries and colon cleanse anyway, do they even want people telling the truth?

So where does that put us? Nobody wants to lose money by quashing flogs altogether, but nobody really likes them. It’s not an easy question to answer, and in the sea of dubious information that is the Internet, aren’t flogs exactly what everybody expects to find?