I and you may well choose to do so, but the vast majority of the human beings believe just anything that is repeated loud and long enough. Otherwise, nobody would hire PR and pay for advertisement, politicians wouln't be fedwith taxpayer's money, Bosnians would trade goods instead of gunshots, etc. I'm personally not interested in conjuring up the latest utopia for a minoritarian sect of illuminati: I need to live in the real world, and push for viable solutions that change it for better, now.
The question is not whether defamation is a problem but whether the courts make the problem better or worse. I think that any analysis of the behaviour of the scientologists would indicate that the courts make the problem worse. Similarly the English libel laws have been used by a long line of crooks and swindlers to extort money. Robert Maxwell being an extreeme example. The thing about the Internet is that it is possible to make a reply. This does not help of course in the example cited, but I don't think that the Mutlu/Serdar flamebot could have been dealt with through the court system. (For those of you who don;t know, a poster calling himself first Hasan B Mutlu, then Serdar Argic used to make insulting responses to anyone who made a USEnet post about the middle east. Mutlu was in fact a perl script run by an agent of the Turkish intelligence services, the objective being to discredit all mention of the Turkish massacre of the Armenians through use of counter propaganda. Mutlu dissapeared from the net at the same time that the sysop of the system he was posting from was deported for overstaying his visa. Phill