True to its trademarked name, MoveOn.org looked at the fight it had created with Sen. Susan Collins’ campaign for re-election and decided, properly, to move on. This week it backed away from invoking its trademark protection against Google-placed ads from the campaign. That was the right decision, after making the wrong choice to follow an older defensive style that the advocacy group had run circles around.

MoveOn.org, an enthusiastic supporter of Sen. Collins’ challenger, Rep. Tom Allen, was to have been the subject of mild ads on Google that made such statements as “Help Susan Collins Stand Up to the MoveOn.org Money Machine.” Lance Dutson, the Collins campaign Internet strategist, was told by a Google official that the search engine “proactively disapprove[s] ads that have a trademarked term in them, unless the advertiser in question has permission to use the term.”

The pointlessness of this overly protective policy was immediately apparent not only to the political right, which skewered MoveOn.org for its free exercise of speech on such occasions as its infamous name switch of Gen. David Petraeus to “Betray us,” but clearly from within the group as well. Nearly a decade old, its path to success came about by spreading a simple, effective message via the Internet: Move on from the Clinton impeachment. An accompanying petition gathered a half-million signatures.

Since then, it has successfully raised funds for left-leaning causes and candidates, pushing its message through print, online, on advertising spaces and just about anywhere else. Its use of the Internet allowed it to become a national influence in a very short time. MoveOn.org owes its existence and success to a broad right to free speech and to the technology of the Internet. That it was involved, temporarily, in stifling electronic speech as a way to keep others from commenting on its behavior was irony its members would especially appreciate.

MoveOn.org, to its credit, quickly figured out its position was impossible to square with its practices. It had the option of changing its mind or, perhaps, starting a net roots campaign against itself. Fortunately, it chose the former.