Mr. Markos has been having a little back and forth with Russ Feingold, Senator from Wisconsen and prominent crusader against big money politics, over the way in which the FEC should regulate political speech on the internet.

It's a pretty important debate to keep track of, because anything which might have a chilling effect on citizen-participation -- the kind of stuff we just began to tap into in 2004 -- would be a major downer.

Feingold seems to have the best of intentions, and his willingness to engage in a public debate on the subject is admirable, but he seems to be working within the confines of the old media paradigm. Kos lays out a position I wholeheartedly endorse here:

Can a bunch of concerned citizens launch a wave of pro-social security television ads? Of course not. Can a wave of concerned citizens launch sites supporting social security? Of course, and we have dozens of them to prove the point. And in fact, citizen activism has, by and large, proven far more successful than anything sponsored by big money.

The Internet is a medium that allows anyone to be a journalist or an activist. We can fight Big Money on this medium and win, and we have been doing so.

What's going to happen, if the FEC attempts to regulate the medium, is that people who are openly and legitimately engaging in online activism can be shut down by frivolous complaints, while the truly nefarious forces will be doing what I describe above -- working in the shadows and using the web's inherent anonymity to ply their dirty wares with impunity.

This is exactly right. Even the current regulations for offline participation favor large-scale players who can hire lawyers to decypher the rules and insure compliance. They also favor large-scale players who can hire lawyers to bring complaints (frivilous or not) against upstart competitors. Extending this balance of power to the net would effectively kill the ability of online communities to go against the will of the established political powers, which is, let's be clear, fundimentally undemocratic and unamerican.

Part of the dynamic that needs to be understood here is the scale and scope of human involvement. When you're talking about broadcast media, you're dealing with a fantastically small number of people on the production/participation end hitting potentially millions on the message-recieving end. When you're talking about the internet, you're really talking about a lot more participants on the production end, even in a coordinated campaign. The metrics are a lot closer to canvassing than to running some media spots.

The practical effect of this is that it's going to be difficult to run large-scale internet political messaging campaigns that are out in the open but which obscure their source. The sheer number of people involved as well as the standard of transparency (as well as the practical transparency of most internet services) means that keeping soemthing really "anonymous" is going to be quite hard, and anything that takes pains to do so will be opening itself up for all kinds of suspicion, which isn't what a successful political campaign wants to generate.

To sum up, the only way to protect "the little guy" online, and more importantly to let the little guy knock the big guy's block off, is to keep regulations off their backs. Some guards against massive corporate financing might be good. Some recourse for "truth in advertising" might also be welcome. But any regulations which are imposed must be simple and clear; easy to comply with and not limiting on people's ability to speak their mind. They must not create a chilling effect, and the must not be a tool for established interests to harass political upstarts.

We'll see what we get.