Anonymity a threat to public discussion?

Åge Hareide, manager for the Norwegian international team, is worried about all the anonymous comments that are being posted about him and his team in blogs, forums and comments. Anonymity is part of what makes the net a great forum for debate, but is it also undermining the seriousness of online discussion?

It seems that anonymous people will say just about anything that comes to mind when they're commenting or debating online. I could an entire book with stupid and harassing comments just from the sites I work for. Online discussion has an enormous potential to become a serious tool for public debate, allowing those without access to traditional forums to have their say. A potential that so far has not been unleashed. But demanding that posters give their full name or that editors should approve each post before it is published (such as mr. Bodahl Johansen from the Norwegian Institute for Journalism wants to do) is not the solution. Such measures would only serve to curb discussion, as the net is a "here and now" medium, and a lot fewer would bother to comment if they couldn't see the fruits of their efforts right away.

A far better solution is to demand registration, and to have some sort of verification to avoid the use of fake names etc. I don't think as many would go around calling people names if they knew that their own name could be associated with their ramblings. Or maybe I'm just naive, maybe we do need pre-approval by editors. If that's the case, we might as well just stop using the Internet as a forum for debate.