EU Crackdown

As part of an effort to overhaul consumer protection from aggressive and bully marketing tactics, the EU has passed an initiative to ban "sock puppet blogs" (fake blogs) and anonymous and/or false identity commenting on blogs. The catch is that not only will perpetrators of these tactics will be held liable, publishers and bloggers themselves will be held accountable for monitoring their blogs for anonymous commenting. The measure is expected to go into effect December 31st of this year. Its a bit alarming-- from a net neutrality stand point. I understand the concern to deter fraud on the internet, as harmless as a little anonymous self-promotion may seem--but to place the burden on publishers? I just wonder what this means for bloggers state side...The UK Times-Online first broke the story here.