Re: " I maintain that ending anonymity on the Internet, would reduce a lot of the hate."
It might. But it will also take away a shield that some need.
The net is built on numerical addresses, not identities. If you want to mandate that all addresses must be associated with identifiable identities, you already got that, look up or subpoena the billing identity for that address.
But i think you want more that that, you want everyone with access to that originating address to be associated with an identifiable entity. You will find most of them are corporations. They sell access to joe blow from anytown, idaho to spout anything he wants. They harvest his data, know his hat size, look into his soul. You want the corporations to disclose his identity to all.
Good luck with that. But lets say you do force disclosure. Immediately, there will be hidden networks and black market in identities. Gee, in fact, there already is ...
Now if you want to stop hidden networks, thats impossible. There is a theorem about steganography being fundamentally impossible to detect, one man's noise is another man's signal. That applies in spades to internet traffic. The earliest example on the internet that i recall was in message passing through tailored nameservice requests in the early nineties, but there are a myriad of other examples since.
Given sufficiently draconian law and enforcement, you could probably id all but a few percent of the users. NSA is already doin it, so is goofacetwit.
My position remains unchanged, I will not participate in a forum that forbids anonymity. Not because i am naive enuf to imagine that the identity associated with the user "sidd" on this forum is very hidden; in fact i think that anyone with half an hour on his hands could easily find my fone number and a street address. Rather because i cannot abide by the privacy violation of forcing identity disclosure.
sidd
