I strongly disagree. Anonymity is an important and integral part of the internet and the free speech it enables. Moving towards this sort of thing will only be used for abuse and censorship. It saddens me how much this has become an accepted position, even on hn, and I'm quite tired of all the justifications for giving up important rights, anonymity is closely related to privacy for example, just because of some scarey boogeyman of the day.
Anonymity offers the ability to criticize entities (governments, corporations, people), to communicate in ways more freely than otherwise, to discuss personal issues without fear, to have a presence online without stalkers or other abusers attack, it also avoids the most common rhetorical abuse I see, which is overreliance on argument from authority by separating the identity of the person making the argument from the argument itself, and I could go on. I could go on...
Do you really think the vast amount of negatives that come with your proposal would be worth the tradeoff?
https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1]
1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.
On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.
At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”
He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.
“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"
And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.
And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen