Regulating Political Communications on the Web: The Case for Restraint
Last week I testified at a hearing of the Fair Political
Practices Commission where I outlined my concerns with the ever-growing
prospect of new regulations on political communications. Over the past several
years we have all witnessed the Internet evolve significantly with the rise of
influential bloggers, the birth of YouTube and the invention of online social
networks. The growth of the Internet has changed nearly every aspect of
peoples’ lives and with that has come the inevitable questions about whether
the government should regulate political activity on the Internet.
The Internet by its very nature is highly democratic,
especially compared to traditional broadcast mediums, and I am deeply concerned
that regulatory actions taken today could have a chilling effect on a vast,
untapped opportunity for civic engagement that the Internet provides. Unlike
advertising on TV and radio which requires a high level of funding available
only to a select few, there are many producers of online content. While it is
possible for political campaigns to "buy" a certain level of presence on the
Internet, anyone with nothing more than a creative message can have an impact
on millions of others in that same medium.
Think Before You Tweet
Unless you live in a cave, you can’t help but hear all the buzz
about Twitter, especially over the last few weeks. Recently, it’s all the media seems to be able to talk about
when it comes to technology. The
political world has been quick to jump on this medium. Even John McCain, who was labeled a Luddite
by some in the 2008 presidential campaign, is getting
into the action.
In times like these, I feel somewhat like SNL’s grumpy
old man. Maybe a bit extreme,
but as a veteran of the dot-com era, I’ve heard this type of hype before. Remember the online grocery retailer Webvan? Well, prior to its catastrophic failure
in 2001, it was going to replace those silly ‘brick and mortar’ grocery stores
once and for all. It turns out
that in spite of the convenience of buying many things online, we all still prefer
to select our produce by hand. But
you wouldn’t have known that if you believed all the media hype back then.
Political Watershed 2008: The Internet Takes its Rightful Place?
I hear a lot of political professionals buzzing these days about the Obama online campaign. That’s a good thing. It seems that Obama’s victory (enabled, in part, by an aggressive online campaign) was the watershed event that the political world needed to finally recognize the internet as powerful political medium.
The last major watershed event of this kind was nearly 50 years ago for television with the televised Kennedy/Nixon debates. Television quickly became the dominant medium for political communications and has continued its reign through the present day. So, it’s natural that many campaign professionals have come to see the world through the one-way, broadcast framework that television requires.
From data we compiled from the 2004 elections, it was clear that there was a disproportionate difference between dollars spent by campaigns on the internet as a percent of total media spending (1%) and the amount of time that Americans were spending on the internet vs. those other mediums (17%). This 17:1 imbalance represented a real opportunity for a campaign to embrace the internet vis-à-vis a competitor running a more “traditional media” campaign. Over the last four years, this analysis proved to be a powerful marketing tool for my business (a political internet agency), but it took the Obama watershed to bring about industry-wide recognition. Again, a very good thing.