American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

By Darryl Mason

In the UK at least, this is the day that marks the beginning of the end of the age of anonymous blogging :

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled today

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.

The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.

In April Mr Horton was awarded an Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were not aware that he was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues, including matters of “public controversy,” the judge said.

Think about it. A Rupert Murdoch newspaper helped shut down a blogger who was reporting the kind of news and opinion that they cannot. And he was pulling the kind of readership that many Murdoch online newspapers would kill half a dozen sub-editors to get.

It wasn’t the police who put this anonymous blogger out of business, and forced this wildly popular blog to be removed from the internet, it was a Rupert Murdoch newspaper.

This is called Killing The Competition With Your Lawyers.

Rupert Murdoch journalists in Australia are trying to do the very same thing with anonymous blogs who ritually smash the credibility of some of Murdoch’s highest paid Australian journalists and opinion writers. It has been made very clear indeed to a small circle of anoymous bloggers in Australia that Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers want to have their true identities exposed in court. And not because they are revealing police or even government secrets, but because they are too criticial of the Murdoch media in Australia.

Around the world, there are plenty of hardcore political blogs published under writers’ real names that will carry on as usual, but there are also tens of thousands of other blogs, on subjects as vast and varied as sex, finance, police brutality, anarchy, the questioning of history, tech, the movie industry, the music industry (what’s left of it) that will now either disappear, or will tone themselves down in fear of the day the writers real indentities are exposed in a court.

We will see a steady, concerted push by politicians, media companies and authorities across Western nations to make it mandatory for blogs to be published under the writers’ real names, and then similar laws will be pushed to do away with anonymous commenting completely.

No doubt, plans are already being discussed to create mandatory online IDs for all internet users, be they readers or writers, creators, publishers or just commenters, game players too. This will of course cost a fee, per year. If you don’t pay for your online ID renewal, you will eventually find it more difficult to get online. These new laws might not get pushed through yet, or in the next few years, but they are most definitely in the pipeline.

That yearly online ID subscription fee for a billion internet users around the world is simply too much money not being collected to never become reality.

When all bloggers must post under their real names, and all commenters must log in with their mandatory online ID numbers, the wild and crazy and absurd and shocking and jaw-dropingly funny and controversial and information-soaked online realities will become far more subdued, restricted, monotone, and sad indeed it is to say, a whole lot less exciting.

Of course there will be plenty of mainstream media companies who will be damned happy to know that bloggers will soon no longer be able to get away with doing what their journalists can never do, so very, very unrestrained - writing brutally honest reality-changing opinion and ‘Truth’ detonating news, and not giving a fuck for the consequences.

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