Anonymity and pseudonymity are perfectly reasonable under some situations. But there are cases where in the transactions both parties really need to know who are we talking to. So what I’m looking for is not that we shut down anonymity, but rather that we offer an option when needed that can strongly authenticate who the parties are.

– Vint Cerf, in an interview with Reuters

Then on Nov. 28, the police showed up at the 20-year-old’s home in Graz, Austria, and accused him of distributing child pornography. He says the authorities confiscated his computers, and he now awaits formal charges that could lead to jail time.

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As anyone who’s ever gotten wrapped up in an online-commenting flame war knows, the Internet doesn’t have the best reputation for resolving disputes. Too often, the discussion doesn’t stray far from “I’m right!” versus “No, I am!”

But conflicts arise online all the time, as Colin Rule knows. The “online dispute guy,” as his coworkers once called him, cut his tech teeth at eBay and PayPal, where he led the group that stepped in when buyers and sellers clashed.

Now, Rule has spun off from eBay to become the CEO of Modria, one of a slew of organizations trying to solve more and more types of disputes online. Modria launched Monday with $1.25 million in seed funding, with The Wall Street Journal also reporting that the company is seeking about $4 million in its Series A round.

Online dispute resolution may sound like a snoozer, but it’s actually needed. In theory, companies such as Modria would take pressure off the courts to get disputes resolved faster and with less need for old-school legal paperwork. That means a cheaper, faster route to peace of mind for businesses, particularly those that live or die with their customer’s trust.

(And no, you don’t have much of a choice in the matter. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court case AT&T v. Concepcion, corporations can legally put arbitration clauses into those Terms of Service that no one ever reads; that means they have the highest court’s blessing to keep customer disputes out of the judicial system entirely.)

Modria is licensing code from eBay — which he compares to a “big brother,” since the two companies are independent but friendly — and applying what he learned there to other types of problems for clients around the world.

While most of eBay’s problems were simple misunderstandings over, for example, when purchased items had to be delivered, Rule said his “Lego block” model can be applied to everything ranging from workplace difficulties to problems with your cellphone bill to Silicon Valley’s new favorite sport of patent disputes.

There are, Rule said, four blocks that can be combined in different ways depending on how significant the problem is: Diagnosing a dispute (which can be done through a simple questionnaire), negotiating (which software can also take care of), mediating (for which you need an impartial human or group to help) and arbitration (which leads to some sort of resolution outside of the courts that both sides have agreed to accept).

Modria’s corporate clients pay a subscription fee to use a customized version of the site’s suite of tools. But for personal affairs, Modria lets anyone use a one-size-fits-all version of those tools for free.

The customized versions of the tools include specific questionnaires and the ability to upload attachments as “evidence” for one side or the other. Paying clients like telecom companies can even build rules into the negotiating software, so that customers can’t haggle below a certain level with the computer.

However, there are some disputes that can’t yet be tackled online. Rule said Modria couldn’t help Craigslist because the site makes sellers anonymous and doesn’t require them to report what actually happened as the result of a cash transaction. He said it is still possible, though, for the parties to remain confidential in an online dispute, just so long as both come to the table.

So the first person to leave a comment on a Gawker network post will now be in charge of policing the thread of commenters who reply, maintaining a high level of discussion and recruiting other voices to participate and bring more page views. And there will be multiple comment moderators and threads per post. Free labor!

In a conversation with longtime blogger Anil Dash, Denton said he’s tried throughout his entrepreneurial career at Moreover and Gawker to cultivate good conversations online, at scale. Lots of things haven’t worked.

For instance, the gamification of comments — basically, giving people badges for repeat participation — were a wrong turn, because they encourage insular communities and aren’t a motivator for the most interesting people.

And while Facebook’s embedded comment system might help control for blog-comment trolls on sites like TechCrunch, Denton said, it makes conversations more boring by discouraging new and anonymous commenters. Those people often share the juiciest information.

“The most interesting comments, they don’t come from people with Klout scores. They don’t come from people with a history on our sites,” Denton said.

The ultimate goal of the new system, Denton said, would be to attract people like American Apparel’s Dov Charney or NBC’s Brian Williams — who are at the center of news on Gawker sites — to chime in themselves.

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Unless there’s a really big shift in sentiment among members of Congress on both sides of the ideological aisle, some version of the Stop Online Piracy Act is going to be passed by Congress sometime in 2012.

That means the legislation is going to wind up on President Barack Obama’s desk, requiring his signature, which would make it law; or his veto, which would effectively kill it. That makes it pretty much the first significant bit of technology policy he will face in the new year.

What’s not entirely clear is which way Obama is likely to decide. So far, the administration hasn’t sent any signals, one way or the other, on either SOPA or its companion bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

But there are some key clues.

SOPA and PIPA are proposed laws that would, among other things, give media companies significant new tools to police pirated online content that appears on Web sites hosted outside of U.S. borders. It would also require U.S. companies that link or do business with them in the normal course of operations — sites such as Google, Yahoo and eBay’s PayPal — to cease doing so.

For instance, Google might be forced by the courts or U.S. law enforcement agencies to stop providing search links to BitTorrent sites that host pirated copies of major motion pictures and television shows. It could go even further than that, by stopping U.S.-based Internet-service companies from allowing users to access any overseas site carrying pirated content.

Critics of the legislation charge that the two bills have gone overboard to protect content. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said it would “criminalize intermediaries.” Other companies, including Yahoo and Facebook, have claimed it could stifle innovation.

The problem the White House will face is that both bills appear to have a broad base of support in Congress. And proponents, such as the House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, are pushing the bill as a means of protecting American jobs by ensuring that profits from U.S.-produced intellectual property flows to the companies that created it.

But there are a few tea leaves indicating where the president might come down on this issue. For one thing, the administration has been pretty clear from the beginning that it supports an open Internet; not vetoing the bill now would be a major policy shift.

And, during 2011, the power of the Internet as a force for social change has been demonstrated throughout the Middle East: Dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are gone, and others are under threat by movements that have been largely organized and coordinated on Facebook and Twitter.

Just last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a conference on Internet freedom in The Hague, made an interesting comment that perhaps captures the nuance of the Obama administration’s position.

As the Hill noted, while sympathetic to the problem countries and companies face in combating the theft of intellectual property, Clinton said that governments can do so “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

The SOPA bill, in particular, would also criminalize contributing to or distributing technology that is meant to circumvent actions that block access to such content. That would put the government at odds with a project it has funded, the Onion Router (a.k.a. TOR), created by U.S. Naval Researchers and a nonprofit organization.

Under SOPA, the problem might be that people in more repressive countries, like China, can use TOR to anonymize traffic and thus bypass technical measures that prevent the free flow of information. The language in the bill is vague enough that TOR could be made illegal.

Then there’s also Obama’s promise to support a free and open Internet generally, which has been a major bedrock of his technology and Internet policy agenda. Early last month, Obama promised to veto a Congressional resolution that would overturn net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission put in place earlier this year, and which was to take effect on Nov. 20. (The Senate saved him the trouble by voting against the resolution.)

Therefore, Obama’s stance on the issue perhaps hints at an aversion to any significant changes in the status quo of the Internet, which suggests he would likely veto any version of SOPA or PIPA that reaches his desk.

“We all have multiple identities. It’s not abnormal; it’s just part of being human,” Poole said, in probably the most interesting session so far at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“I cherish having options,” Poole said, joking that he can find more choices in the toothbrush aisle than ways to express himself online. “What’s really at stake now is the ability to be expressive on the Internet.”

Justifications for multiple identities include youthful indiscretions, personal and professional distinctions, exploring random communities and interests, and the more general drive to be able to choose how you present yourself to the world, Poole said.

Somewhat ironically, Poole’s new start-up Canvas does use Facebook authentication, Poole said — because it’s an easy way to filter out trolls and spammers. But after that Canvas users can then express themselves however they want.

Poole argued that it’s this diversity of options that must be preserved. Instead of using filtering techniques Google Circles and Facebook Smart Lists, he said, “It’s not who you share with, it’s who you share as.”

He concluded, “Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want to think about what the world would be if we did it right.”

Image credit Sage Ross.

It seems to me that the larger issue in this ongoing real names debate is not who you say you are, but the usefulness of a unified Web identity. The more we condense our online selves into a single person, the more reliable, accountable and monetizable our Web experiences can be.

Facebook and Google are fighting a war over which company will be the preferred personalization experience across their own and other people’s Web sites and apps. Both companies offer Web identity systems that they want us to stay logged into all day long, whether we’re reading the news, listening to music or looking at photos.

Having a unified identity isn’t necessarily a bad thing for users, because it can make the Web more customized and convenient. It can also be super creepy.

When I log into my Google Dashboard, I can learn that the last thing I bought with Google Checkout was a pair of shoes in June ’09, that I last synced my mail on my iPhone at 1:27 am last night, and that I’ve had 1,518 Google Voice calls. That is a seriously quantified self.

Facebook and Google+ may say that they require “real names,” but I’m not convinced that they’re terribly serious about it. Neither site requires users to send in their passports to create an account (though they do sometimes ask for legal verification in disputed cases). Like danah boyd, I know many Facebook users who use pseudonyms, often for obviously justifiable reasons or simply because they like more privacy.

For that matter, I’ve also become friends with a few pet dogs as well as dummy accounts created by developers, which Facebook didn’t officially support until last month.

Facebook does do some policing of its terms of use but it obviously turns a blind eye to pseudonyms much of the time. It seems to rely more on a culture of real names than strict enforcement. Users who choose to go by their commonly used names are probably more likely to have a full Facebook experience, simply because more people they know will find them and interact with them.

Google+, meanwhile, has tweaked its “real name” requirement after offending users by deleting their accounts on the presumption that they broke the rules. It still doesn’t have a clear policy in place but there’s time for the month-old invite-only “field trial” product to evolve. For now, the service is allowing users to submit their nicknames and display them to certain circles of friends, though that’s not the same thing as allowing multiple accounts.

Even if I’m giving Google+ a pass for now, I will say Google is currently utterly terrible at understanding its users’ multiple identities. I have a Google Apps account for work and a Gmail account for personal email and am constantly bumping into access problems despite having supposedly set up a multiple account feature.

For a while I contributed to a (silly, harmless) blog under a pseudonym, and now every time I go to make a comment on a Blogger site, it’s under that name because I linked it to my Gmail address. And do I really want every video I ever watch on YouTube tied to my Google account? Not really, but if I log out of YouTube I log out of everything.

None of this inconvenience has to do with whether or not I used my genuine certified real name — it’s about Google or Facebook trying to get me to use a single account for all my activities.

Facebook’s Mark and more recently Randi Zuckerberg have famously called for the end of anonymity and denigrated inconsistent online identities. But Randi was on her way out the door and Mark later tried to recant his comments, saying he didn’t mean to make value judgments about people’s lives. Their stated positions are too uncompromising to be defensible.

As Caterina Fake writes, pseudonyms have different purposes — among them, stage names and noms de plume, false names used for protection and haters and trolls. Requiring “real names” on online services is a clumsy though often effective attempt to fend off trolls. Sites like Google+ and Facebook don’t actually need real names to do their business.

What Facebook and Google really seem to be after is condensing our accounts into one. That in itself is a scary and awkward prospect as well — but it’s not as simple as requiring a “real name.”

Passport image credit: FreeFoto.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Janrain, a Web identity management provider, has survived six years in the space and today is announcing $15.5 million in new funding led by Emergence Capital Partners and including Anthem Venture Partners, DFJ Frontier and RPM Ventures.

Janrain says it’s now used on 350,000 websites, including those made with Ning, KickApps and Get Satisfaction. You can see an example of how Janrain works on the Nasdaq community site below — basically, visitors are given the option to authenticate themselves with an existing account on another social service.

Web sites — that pay Janrain for its services — benefit because they can piggyback on the login and profile information users provide to other sites.

See also: Clearspring, which offers social sharing tools with an advertising business model, recently raised $20 million.

The app, called LAL People and available for Web, iPhone and Android, is rather simple: users sign up with their email address or Facebook account. A profile is created with all sorts of information — profile picture, favorite music, teams, movies, even birthdate and education — whatever LAL can scrape from Facebook or get from the user directly.

But there’s one biggish difference: LAL People profiles do not show the user’s name or email.

That light veil of anonymity could lead to new and exciting interactions… but it’s also likely to inspire spammy and hollow conversations, if the history of chat rooms and forums is any precedent.

The underlying idea is this: LikeALittle was originally created around flirting on college campuses — where users have lots in common — so LAL People tries to approximate that by ranking users by its best guess that they’ll be interested in chatting and meeting with each other.

LikeALittle recently raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The service seems remarkably similar to 4chan, the rowdy image-sharing message board, but rather than anonymity, Canvas requires that users have accounts (would-be users currently sign up through Facebook Connect), and unlike 4chan, Canvas keeps an archive of posted graphics (and will reportedly later support other media).

Poole has described his goal with Canvas as trying “to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.” Canvas and 4chan are run separately.

Unlike the many personal and professional image-sharing sites that already exist, Canvas seems oriented toward PhotoShop jobs, cartoons and memes (more like Cheezburger, which often riffs off 4chan-originated concepts, and just raised $30 million for an Internet comedy empire). Canvas is backed by Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kenneth Lerer and Joshua Schachter.

Image via TechCrunch.

The Laughing Squid blog points us to the site, Chatroulettemap.com, which puts users–and their images–on a Google (GOOG) map, based on their IP address. The site doesn’t map everyone on Chatroulette (right now it lists only about 2,500 people), and it doesn’t mean that anyone who logs onto Chatroulette will be mapped. But it does provide an interesting glimpse of Chatroulette for those who don’t want to try the service.

The still pictures are about what you’d expect–which means some of them aren’t safe for work. But more importantly, they make the point that anonymity on the Web isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

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Google (GOOG) handed over the woman’s identifying information to Liskula Cohen, who was trying to find out who had insulted her on “Skanks in NYC,” a now-defunct site created using Blogger. Cohen argued that she had been defamed by the site’s anonymous proprietor and needed to find out who that person was in order to sue him or her. On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden agreed, and yesterday Google complied with her order.

In an interview with “Good Morning America” host Dianne Sawyer today (sorry, no embed!), Cohen says her antagonist is a frenemy of sorts–“an irrelevant person in my life…that girl who was always there,” and that’s she not sure whether she’ll sue her after all.

The bigger question is whether the case sets a new precedent for unmasking anonymous voices on the Web, and I suppose it’s possible that it will: If you don’t like what people have written about you and you can hire a lawyer who can convince a judge that you’ve been defamed, you can out them.

But the truth is that the anonymity most people think they’re enjoying on the Web has always been an illusion.

Every time you use the Internet, you’re leaving a trail of identifiable information–even if you never log in to a single service, your IP address can give you away, or at least come close to it. And if you do use any kind of service at all, or at least one based in the U.S., your identity has always been available to someone who can get a subpoena. Worth thinking about next time you want to spout off without signing your name.

To avoid a South Korean law that would require users who upload or comment on videos to first register with their real names, YouTube last week disabled those two features on its local Korean site, according to the company. The move garnered new attention Monday, after it was reported by a Korean publication, Hankyoreh.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for YouTube parent Google (GOOG), said it devised the compromise because it believes in users’ rights to be anonymous online. He notes that users in Korea can upload and comment on videos by changing their country settings to another geographic zone. And users of the Korean site can still watch videos anonymously.

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“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff. “Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.”

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