I don’t think this is a big problem. Yes, it will make it harder for some kinds of people to get a job. But then, I think that the kinds of jobs people get will start to change too. And I do think that employers will eventually learn to better understand the search results. And that includes being able to put teacup tempests into the proper perspective.

The real solution is to have autoadmit pull the postings at the request of the person being defamed. Autoadmit is being a real baby about this.

What you may consider innocuous and beneficial may translate into an obnoxious liability. Employers, I have found, really don’t want employees who can think for themselves or have sufficient chutzpah to participate in anything that affects change either politically, socially or otherwise.

The bottom line is that most of them want compliant drones just smart enough to do XYZ task and that’s it. You check your 1st Amendment right at the door along with all your other rights employers have been steadily usurping /running roughshod over the years (drug screening, credit checking, etc.) Using your real name to post anything online is career suicide, IMO.

So we need to start scoffing whenever anyone mentions dodgy, anonymous information obtained via Google (though a person’s homepage of course may be very relevant).

This was something my father and many of his generation had to deal with as an electrician moving locations. He and his fellows solved it by joining the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffalos, a sort of friendly society that also saddled members with obligations not to do crap work or rip people off, and in return the members would look out for you in the workplace, get you gigs etc. For a while between the 20s and 60s I think it was pretty effective.

– it’s cowardice that harms us here, not anonymity.

…which is just the point of drawing a class line. People with (durable, uniquely searchable) names cannot be cowardly in this fashion: thanks to search, they necessarily stand behind their words forever. And “cowardice” is not even a category that can be applied to the others; they are simply transparent wraiths with regard to any matter of honor. Servants will talk belowstairs, of course, but they are powerless to accuse (save in open court, where all are equal under the law’s protection, and even anonymous whistleblowers can give factual testimony).

The women who were wronged in this case would have been protected, if they had been able to rely on a broad and inflexible polite convention that anonymous words bear only factual or analytical, never moral or social, weight. “Well, yes, one hears all sorts of things from under that rock. Do you find it amusing? I’m afraid I don’t.” The vulgarian is abashed, someone coughs nervously, and the committee moves on to the candidate’s letters of recommendation.

“I think they thought we wouldn’t shoot kids. But we showed them we don’t care. We are going to do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe.”
Doing what we have to do. As opposed to doing what honor says needs to be done, i.e. when a fireman enters a building that may collapse or explode etc.
This confusion about bravery and risk and selfishness is culture-wide, and nowhere more virulent than in anonymous flame wars and the physical security of the internet’s fora.
People did these things with telephones and anonymous tips before there were home computers, and they surely did them when all they had to hand were surreptitious notes and whispers. The flaw is in the man not the media – it’s cowardice that harms us here, not anonymity.

The only marginal cases I can see is where material has been removed from the website, but is still located via the google cache or similar resources – this is only temporary of course, and they have been known to remove material from the cache on request in a few cases – effectively they can be treated as another publisher of the same material and pursued separately, in which case they are likely to remove it without too much fuss, as they have little to gain trying to keep questionable material cached once it has been removed from the original site.

Another potential problem is jurisdiction, and is something I consider likely to be one of the big issues in the coming years, I can see a potential push from some areas for an agency like the UN to develop a unified set of laws and judiciary for the internet (even if I also see its unlikely to come about due to the politics), otherwise unscrupulous website creators will be able to dodge many laws just by siting their servers in some country that sees an advantage in allowing lax laws in this area to get the extra business/tax; Nigeria would seem like a potential front runner at this time, but this could easily change, and possibly different types of abuse might find different homes – you might start phishing businesses in Nigeria, spam in Russia, copyright abuse in China, etc., based on which country has the best legal environment to protect your particular speciality.

This also seems implausible to me. This would mean that these pages we are talking about are actually not malicious at all. Most of us have been assuming that they are in fact very nasty, not just innocently and amorally prankish.