Republican FEC chair warns the feds may want to regulate online videos

Republican Chairman of the Federal Election Committee (FEC) Lee Goodman said Monday that his fellow committee members are considering creating an "online review board" that could regulate political internet videos as soon as next year.

Fox News reports that on Friday, the FEC revealed that it had considered "pursuing a case against a group for posting free YouTube videos before the 2012 election without filing financial forms." Ann Ravel, the FEC's top Democrat and likely its next chair, proposed that the FEC look into regulating videos next year. Goodman says the FEC's behavior "confirms my warnings."

Goodman previously warned that FEC officials would like to regulate the media, and perhaps even book publishers, accusations which FEC Democrats called "overheated."

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Ravel says a "re-examination" of the FEC approach to the internet and its influence on politics is "long overdue." The Democrat has accused Republicans of being inconsistent, saying that not applying the same rules to TV and web videos "simply does not make sense," despite the fact that an "internet exemption" from 2006 spares free web videos from FEC regulations.