Regulating anonymous blogs?
An article by Marcel Berlins in today’s Guardian raises the issue of internet libel, especially by anonymous bloggers:
…The web encourages lies and deceit. It’s impossible to know who lurks behind a funny nickname
On the whole, I can’t complain too much about the readers who respond to my column online … [but] I seriously considered suing one commenter for libel; I would have won, and English law, for purposes of libel litigation, allows the real identity behind an online pseudonym to be discovered.
It is that anonymity that’s at the hub of a debate and vote that takes place in the European Parliament tomorrow. An Estonian MEP, Marianne Mikko, is worried that a growing number of blogs are written with “malicious intentions or hidden agendas”. She proposes that bloggers identify themselves and declare any interests they have in the issue they’re writing about. Her concerns should be taken seriously. … We may soon have to consider devising controls on entry, though what form they’ll take is not easy to envisage. It is possible that we will find out, in five or 10 or 20 years, that, in the internet, we have created a monster we cannot tame, whose capacity for doing harm exceeds any good it once brought.
Some own goals are 
