It is one of the most irritating and ubiquitous annoyances of the internet age: the anonymous commenter. Hiding behind a made-up moniker, anonymous commenters surface on virtually every blog or news website, posting bile, insults, prejudice and ignorance, often for the sheer hell of it.

In the free for all that has so far marked internet-based publishing, there seems to be no recourse for those targeted by the so-called "trolls". Certainly not of the sort they would have if such comments were published in hard copy on the letters pages of old media newspapers and magazines, where the threat of libel has kept up standards. But, perhaps, no longer.

A law suit filed last week in New York has threatened to hold some of the internet's more unpleasant denizens to account: a rare example of old media rules starting to be applied online.

The heroine of the tale is Carla Franklin, a former model and graduate of Columbia Business School. She is taking Google to court over anonymous comments that called her a "whore" on the firm's YouTube website. She is seeking a court order to force Google to identify the person behind the insult. According to her lawyer, Franklin already suspects a certain individual of posting the comments, but needs concrete confirmation before she can go after them in a court of law. She is claiming the insult, which was posted several times by the same YouTube user, was "… made with the intention to harm Ms Franklin's reputation and interfere with her relationships, employment and livelihood".

It is hard not to cheer Franklin's cause. Anonymous commenters claim that the cloak of secrecy allows greater frankness and honesty and means whistleblowers and others perhaps hampered by their jobs can post things online with greater safety. But in reality it is all too often just a handy excuse to be rude, juvenile or racist. Franklin is also riding a growing wave against anonymity online. Several American news websites, including the Buffalo News newspaper, have recently forced commenters to use their real names when posting their opinions on stories.