Remember the debate about whether or not anonymous commenters were good or evil? Well, let's take it up a notch. The Cleveland Plain Dealer -- who amusingly just recently told its reporters they needed to engage more in the comments on their stories -- had a persistent commenter, who was a bit vocal, and at times mean. After she posted a comment questioning the mental state of a relative of a reporter, the newspaper decided to look into who was behind the comments, and realized that it is a high profile local judge, who has actually been in the news a lot lately. The judge's daughter tried to claim credit for the posts, but apparently there's some evidence that suggests the judge made many, if not all, of the comments (it was her email address, and apparently it's clear that many of the comments came from her work computer). Some of the comments even came on cases she was involved in. Of course, it's also worth noting that she had threatened a reporter from the Plain Dealer with jailtime if he didn't reveal his source for a story (and, yes, this is why we need a strong journalism shield law), so the Plain Dealer may be seen as having an axe to grind.

Still this raises a bunch of questions that lots of sites struggle with. We've often wondered about it ourselves, as there are times when it's obvious who a commenter is -- and even here on Techdirt we've had high level execs pseudononymously comment (while doing little to hide their real identity) -- even at times about issues they were involved in. And, to some extent, those situations seem newsworthy -- though not everyone would agree. Along those lines, we've sometimes pointed out that two commenters may be the same person, though never revealing who they actually are in real life. But, again, does that reach an ethical standard? Of course, a few months ago, there were similar concerns when the online editor at StlToday.com called the boss of a commenter, leading the commenter to resign. But that was purely vindictive, and of no journalistic significance.

It's easy to just say that no publication should ever reveal such info -- but if it has journalistic value, and the commenter has done little to hide their actual identity, it certainly reaches a gray area. I can see the arguments on both sides of this issue. In the end, I don't think it's a good idea to "out" commenters' true identities, but if there is journalistic value in the information, rather than just doing it out of spite or anger, I don't think it's as clear cut as some are making it out to be.

This sort of debate comes up every so often among folks who run news/commentary sites, and it seems to have boiled over again recently, as a bunch of newspapers/blogging folks got into a nice little discussion on the goodness or evilness of anonymous comments. Not surprisingly, I side with Mathew Ingram on this one. Since we began, we've always allowed anonymous comments, and, for the most part, find that we've benefited tremendously from allowing that sort of level of speech.

Does this mean we prefer people comment anonymously? Not at all. In fact, we try to encourage people to identify themselves in some manner, but we generally do so by providing greater and greater benefits for those who have verified accounts (with a lot more on the way). However, we recognize that there are times when there are benefits to having people comment anonymously, and we see no reason to take away those benefits.

Does this mean that people don't abuse this privilege? Again, not at all. However, it is actually quite rare that anonymous commenters abuse their ability to be anonymous. It does happen at times, and, in our opinion, there are ways to deal with this that don't involve banning anonymous commenters at all. Some of these methods we have not implemented yet, but we're working hard on them (and, yes, this blog post will hopefully act as a push to those doing the coding...).

Techdirt gets an awful lot of comments, and we've been at this for a long time. We've seen no evidence that anonymous comments, by themselves, are a problem. You can have an occasional annoying commenter at times, but on the whole, the quality of the discussions we see in the comments here is much better than on many other sites that do not allow anonymous comments, and seem to stall out with just a few comments on each story (even on sites that get a lot more traffic than us).

There is a bit of a balancing act that needs to go on. At times, people start demanding we moderate comments (when a particularly annoying commenter hijacks a thread, for example), but then, when a legitimate commenter accidentally gets his or her comment caught in our spam filter, suddenly they get angry and ask "how dare you moderate comments!" Of course, as we explain, if you have a legitimate comment and it gets caught, we free it up within a few hours. If your comment is blatant spam, however, it gets deleted -- and at times, we have noted that "pure trolling" is spam (i.e., comments that don't advertise anything commercial, but are so far off-topic that they are designed solely to send the discussion off-topic). We will never block commenters just because you disagree, however, no matter how wrong you might be or are anonymous. We did have an issue for a while, where our UI confused some commenters into submitting totally blank comments (which automatically get held as spam) because two submit buttons could be seen, and some people clicked the wrong one -- but we recently fixed the comment UI to solve this. Unfortunately, this did confuse some people, including some people who accused us of moderating legit comments, and we apologize for that UI confusion.

On the whole, we have a pretty great community of folks around here -- including those of you who I regularly disagree with. It makes for a fun conversation. Sure, every so often, an immature person tries to cause trouble, but those are few and far between, and it's not because they're anonymous, but because they're jerks. The vast majority of our anonymous commenters (even those we disagree with) add value to the conversation, and blocking them completely seems counterproductive.

It's no secret that I'm a supporter of allowing more skilled immigrants into the US. The arguments against it make little sense and are usually thinly veiled racism against foreigners. Plenty of studies have shown that skilled immigrants help create new jobs rather than take them away. And barring skilled immigrants from coming into the US just means that they end up working for non-US competitors, rather than helping US companies grow. It's hard to fathom a reason to be against increasing skilled immigration, other than being racist or economically illiterate. Now, that said, it's also no secret that the H-1B process that is one of the main (though not only) routes for skilled technology foreigners to work in the US has some serious flaws and is often abused. But the response should not be to end the H-1B program, but to fix the abuses.

All that said, I'm somewhat horrified at the reports (which a whole bunch of you are sending in) about a judge ordering three anti-H-1B websites be taken totally offline. I disagree heavily with those three sites, and think that they are misleading in the extreme, but the order to take them offline goes way overboard. The judge even went further and ordered Facebook to disable the Facebook page of one of the sites.

At issue are libel and copyright charges from a company named Apex, which these sites accuse of abusing the H-1B process. Given that I'm very much against the abuses, I'm all for exposing those who abuse the process. Now here's where things get weird. The main issue is that these sites posted a copy of what's supposedly an employment agreement from Apex, and the discussion "alleges that employees will find it difficult to leave Apex because of its contract terms." Apex claims that this is defamatory, and notes that it had three "consultants" refuse to report for employment because of it. Yet... it also claims that it holds the copyright on the documents. In other words, it admits that the documents are real and legitimate. Otherwise it wouldn't hold the copyright. Thus, it's hard to see how the two charges can stand together. Either the documents are false and defamatory, or there's (potential) copyright infringement and the documents are accurate in portraying Apex's contract terms. So which is it?

Unfortunately we don't know, because the judge has shut down everything.

What's not at all clear is why the judge would completely shut down all three websites and the Facebook page. If there are problems with just this document, order an injunction against that document. Completely shutting down all three websites goes way too far, and seems to go well beyond what either defamation law or copyright law should allow.

I am still not convinced that we need special laws mandating net neutrality, but I find the arguments from telcos that no one would ever block sites or services to be highly unbelievable. There have been cases of it happening in the past, and there are cases of it happening now. Shocklee points us to the news that a Russian ISP has been blocking websites that the government has dubbed "extremist," even though they include political opposition sites like Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity's Rusolidarnost.ru and the National Bolshevik Party's Nazbol.ru. Combine that with attempts in the UK and Australia to give the government the ability to make up secret lists of sites that should be blocked by ISPs, and you can see why some believe it's important, as a fundamental principle, that ISPs should allow access to any site. US telcos say that they are in the business of encouraging free speech, and they would be crazy to block sites, but what we're seeing around the world suggests that there are times when ISPs do decide to block sites, and it's often due to political pressure from governing parties.

Bijan Sabet is asking a good question. It's one that's been asked plenty of times before, of course, but it remains relevant: why do so few newspapers ever link off of their site? He points to recent articles from the NY Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times and the SF Chronicle, and notes that none of them have links to outbound sites. Some of this is due to a confused view of the web, that you never want to send people to another site, because (incorrectly) that means fewer page views on your own site. Of course, that ignores the fact that sites like Google have made quite a nice business out of sending people to other sites -- a business those very same newspapers are all quite jealous of. And, it also stems from the old line belief that the job of a newspaper is to tell you "everything you need to know," so why would you ever admit that there may be other sources of value? And, of course, that's why some people are getting sick of newspapers. Plenty of other online sources have learned that linking to others is an important part of the conversation, as is allowing readers/users/community members to explore the story themselves -- and to contribute to it. I still find it amusing when someone follows a link I've posted and then adds some interesting perspective/data point/fact and claims that they've somehow "caught" me making an error. That's part of why I post the links in the first place -- hoping that readers will continue to dig deeper and figure out more of the story and contribute and add to it. It's too bad so few newspapers feel the same way.

Back in April, the state of Minnesota tried to force ISPs to block certain gambling websites. Similar attempts had been tried in a few other states, and quickly shot down by the courts -- and it didn't take long for a lawsuit to emerge in Minnesota. However, the good news is that the state has apparently agreed to back down rather than trying to fight a bogus and costly lawsuit. Basically, it sounds like enough lawyers explained to state officials that their likelihood of winning was pretty slim -- so the state just folded. At least they didn't keep trying to waste taxpayer money trying to fight for such censorship.

It appears that Egypt is the latest country to think that it can ban certain websites by court mandate. In this case, it's all pornographic websites, which have been deemed "venomous and vile" by the court. The lawyer who was arguing against those sites responded happily: "Thank God we won, now the government should stop these electronic dens of vice immediately." Of course, what's been left unstated is exactly how the government can stop pornographic websites? My guess is they'll demand ISPs do it for them. However, in the meantime, we're left wondering how these "venomous and vile" sites are forcing themselves on poor Egyptians. I do plenty of web surfing and have found that simply not surfing porn websites is a rather effective way to not have to deal with such "electronic dens of vice."

There have been a few attempts by state governments to force ISPs to block certain sites, and such attempts almost always end badly. Recently, for example, the state of Kentucky has been not just trying to block access to gambling-related websites, but to seize the domains in question. That failed when the courts pointed out how ridiculous it was. Perhaps the most famous such attempt was Pennsylvania's law to try to force ISPs to block "undesirable" sites from a list the gov't would put together. A federal court tossed the law, saying that it was unreasonable. You would think that other states would take notice before trekking down a similar path. But, apparently the news hasn't reached Minnesota.

Slashdot points out that Minnesota is trying to twist a law from half a century ago to mean that ISPs need to block gambling websites. Basically, the law says that common carriers need to comply with government requests to block gambling services. Of course, that assumes that ISPs are, in fact, common carriers -- a point that many would dispute. Also, the law was clearly intended for a very different purpose than someone using a broadband connection to access a gambling site. Still, gambling is another topic that politicians love to grandstand about, so expect this to keep moving forward, even if it makes no sense and has little chance of surviving a legal challenge.

We've mentioned several times about how sports leagues are trying to crack down on unauthorized web streams of their games. It's a misguided effort that fails to recognize the opportunity here: people watch these streams because they generally don't have other options. Largely, they're not cheapskate pirates, but underserved customers. With that in mind, it was nice to see a story in the WSJ a few days back talking about how some American leagues' subscription streaming services are enjoying success. They've figured out that by offering users a better service than the pirate streams, they can get them to pay subscription fees. This gets to the heart of so many different industries' battles against piracy: it's not a technological problem that exists because there are inadequate locks for content, it's a business problem that exists because many companies are too complacent to develop services that deliver consumers content they want in a format they desire.

You may recall a few years back that China started demanding that all websites register with the government for approval. We hadn't heard much about the program since then, but apparently the government has recently decided to shut down thousands of "unregistered" websites, mostly of small businesses. Considering the state of the economy these days (yes, in China as well), you would think that China would think twice before shutting down small business websites... but apparently the ability to control the internet trumps all economic concerns.