Earlier today, we launched NetDemocracyGuide.org, a tool intended to help bloggers and Internet political activists easily understand the good news contained in the new Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules for the Internet. A year and a half ago, the announcement of that rulemaking ignited a firestorm of opposition among bloggers, political activists and free speech advocates, who feared that imposing complex and burdensome rules to the Internet would chill the political activities of ordinary Americans. The signs were ominous. A draft of the proposed rule leaked to bloggers appeared to confirm the worst. But less than a year later, the FEC announced an unusually flexible and thoughtful rule that leaves the vast majority of citizen initiated political activity on the Internet unregulated. The fact is unless you are paying for advertisements on third party sites, you probably don’t have to worry about campaign finance rules at all.

Simply put, the Internet won and did so because of the extraordinary efforts of thousands of bloggers, activists and experts who joined with organizations like CDT to sound the alarm and educate the FEC, Congress, the mainstream media and the public about how the Internet is bringing down the barriers posed by money in politics, revitalizing democratic discourse and giving citizens the power to be journalists, commentators, organizers and political leaders. The new CDT guide is our way of thanking you all, publicizing this victory, encouraging more of you to join the online revolution this election season and helping you to plan your activities.

As readers of this blog well know, we are facing many other challenges to free speech online including bills like the Deleting Online Predators Act (aptly pronounced dope-ah), which would ban chat, social networking and probably blogging in schools and libraries and a number of bills (already buried in must-pass appropriations bills) that would require warning labels on “sexually explicit” Internet content. We need the Internet community respond to these attacks on Internet freedom with the same fervor and skill with which it took on the FEC rules.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Free Expression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.