The Channel Wire

August 20, 2009

The 'Skanks Of NYC' blogging case involving former Vogue cover girl Liskula Cohen has once again cast the issue of online anonymity into the spotlight. VARs might assume that the issue has no relevance to their businesses, but don't think technology companies aren't watching this case with hawk-like intensity, as they'd love to be able to find the source of critical voices too.

First off, it bears mentioning that the issue of anonymous defamation online has been around since the dawn of the Internet and is fraught with grey areas that are still being hammered out. Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, says the exact contours of what constitutes defamation online remain unsettled to this day.

In the Cohen case, a mean spirited individual last year began waging a character assignation campaign on Cohen through a blog hosted by Google's Blogger.com service. Cohen filed suit in January to force Google to reveal the anonymous blogger's identity, and a court this week ruled in her favor.

What if this decision were applied to anonymous criticism of IT vendors? Of course, there's a big difference between calling someone a skank and claiming that a company's software product is inferior, but vendors would love nothing more than to have the law on their side in cases where pesky bloggers disparage their products.

Naturally, the Web is thick with critical voices aimed at every vendor in the industry. The very first result returned in a Google search of "HP sucks" contains the message: "I just want to warn everyone away from buying any kind of HP/Compaq notebook," while the first result for "Oracle sucks" is a page describing the company's database software as "a complete stinking pile of you know what".

Searching for "Microsoft sucks" returns the Microsoftsucks.org Web site, which features a wide range of critical views on the software giant's business.

It's plausible to consider that anonymous speech could become part of the competition between regional VARs going after the same piece of the market, which has been growing fiercer as of late due to tightening IT budgets.

For example: One VAR could start an anonymous blog that impugns the security expertise of another VAR, or to highlight how that VAR's allegiance to a particular vendor clouds their objectivity in a way that could be damaging to customers. If properly aimed, that could be enough to sway customers' purchasing decisions.

Companies that have been fighting against anonymous criticism since the earliest days on online interaction, filing lawsuits against 'John Does' in order to force ISPs to reveal posters' identities, are probably going to be encouraged by the Google ruling.

"These subpoenas have effectively shut off discussion in many public forums," according the Web site for Chillingeffects.org, a joint project between the Electronic Freedom Foundation and several universities that highlights First Amendment protections for online activities.

The Securities and Exchange Commission figured out early on that the Internet was a perfect place to conduct 'pump-and-dump' stock scams, and moved to identify miscreants engaged in this activity. Could blogs be the next frontier from which anonymity is stripped away?