BRUSSELS, September 5, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com)
The European Union has issued a document recommending that some means be found to regulate and identify bloggers. The report by the Committee on Culture and Education "suggests clarifying the status, legal or otherwise" of weblogs. But bloggers have in response issued a warning that the EU's desire to "clarify the status" of bloggers is a code for finding a means of government control of expression on the internet and keeping a bureaucratic eye on who is doing the blogging.

British political blogger Iain Dale, who writes under the masthead "Iain Dale's Diary", linked to the report that complains that the identity and status of blog "authors and publishers, including their legal status, is neither determined nor made clear to the readers of the weblogs, causing uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits."

While the Committee said it only "encourages" the "voluntary labelling" of blogs to identify the authors, Dale wrote that the bureaucrats of the EU do not, to say the least, enjoy the complete trust of Europe's blogging community. Of particular interest to the EU, they warn, are those bloggers who have been successful at revealing the anti-democratic machinations of the EU itself.

Bloggers have defended the complete freedom of the bloggosphere that allows anyone with a computer to say whatever he wants about any subject of interest. Blogs, they contend, are the last bastion of completely free speech, unencumbered by Europe's sticky and stultifying mesh of bureaucratic regulations. They are also self-regulating. A blogger who is boring or whose facts are off, is quickly corrected by legions of commenters and other bloggers, a scrutiny not felt by mainstream media. The popularity of blogging, they say, is a direct result of this unregulated environment.

"They don't seem to like blogs or even understand the concept of blogging, do they?" Dale wrote about EU bureaucrats. "We all know that 'voluntary' soon becomes 'compulsory'. My label is the title of my blog. That is quite sufficient, and I don't need some faceless Eurocrat to tell me otherwise."
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