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Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

>Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.

I mean you already do. What do you call a signing up to an ISP?

All my ISP can see are the entry points I communicate with. Today I can tunnel all my traffic through my own VPN mesh, someone else's VPN mesh, open proxies, private proxies and I can reach most sites. That is how I operate today. If that becomes illegal to do, then I would be an outlaw and would have to write a song about it. My band of merry outlaws would travel the countryside, giving anonymous internet to everyone.

Require? Illegal? ID is not required to use the internet, nor is it illegal to do so without. I can, or at least could before covid, go to the local public library and use their wifi with no questions asked. That's a government provided service, not some sketchy edge case like 'sharing your social security number with your friends'.

Yes but I can take my laptop to my friend's place and use their internet, seemingly as someone who lives in that house. I think OP is talking more so about an ID (like driver's license type of thing) to use the internet. So that one might be able to say person X visited site Y (again, we have something similar to that now, but not exactly)

You can also ask to use your friends social ID. The only reason why you'd find it odd is that you're not used to it.

You can still (I think) go into a corner shop and get a SIM for cash in the UK which gives you access to online data. Can probably even top up the data allowance with cash too. Get a second hand phone for cash from someone like CEX and you're pretty much anonymous, I think (barring opsec snafus.)

You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id.

Alternatively, you can use free wifi or a burner SIM with data. That possibility is not the case in every country, nor will it necessarily remain open in the future.

> You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id.

I don't remember for my current place but I know that when I first moved to the US I needed a credit check to get internet access in my home.

Government issued currency is required to pay them, which requires a job, which requires.

It’s gate keeping all the way down, it’s already here.

Everyone was all “ooo 1984! Scurry! Let’s build a Brave New World to combat it!”

Really though at this point, aside from science what industrial discovery is there?

We’re still just “flock building” like splinter religions.

This syntax or that, still an ARM or x86 chip with known limitations.

Programming to our imaginations delight is great as an art. Industrializing it is just pandering to speculative economics. “Bet you can’t!” “Bet I can!”

Round n round we go; HR and accounting filtering for the right kind of compliance.

Sure fear the government.

I fear humanity. It’s insane and clearly intent on its destruction

> What do you call a signing up to an ISP?

That is a business relationship, where a personal license to access the Internet refers to a government grant for use. Those are drastically different from each other.

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