I want that. I'm tired of bots being half the internet traffic or more. It's driving the general public insane and anonymity on the internet has zero utility. If journalists need to send sensitive information, they'll always be able to use Tor.
But keep in mind that these laws don’t result in your identity being public. They will ultimately result in the sites you’re posting on know that you’re an enumerated individual. The ultimate benefit as I see it is removing outsized leverage over public opinion by botting likes on your statement or otherwise operating tons of accounts. It should also eliminate threats of violence from the digital public square, since building a prosecution pipeline against those would be easy to do. Same with child grooming, but I’ll acknowledge there’s a way to make that argument in a glib way, as an excuse to realize some of the other goals. It is a real problem though.
I don't see how these laws wouldn't make your identity public to someone, even if it's not the public at large. But it'd be enough for that someone to be an individual or entity who turns out to be interested in silencing your voice. Their knowledge of your identity would probably give them power to silence you not only on their platform but also on other platforms, if access to those other platforms is also tied to one single identity.
Bots are a problem but I suspect there are other ways of dealing with them, ways that don't involve making anonymity or pseudonymity impossible.
I attribute it mostly to bots, whether from corporate, state, or NGO activity. It’s almost impossible to tell what the organic consensus is on anything. Lies spread faster than ever, and it’s confusing the public enough that this is a very real crisis.
It’s nice that you suspect that botnets could be handled in some other hypothetical way. But in a technical sense, there’s not really a way to do that without enumerating real identity in some way.
There are a dozen ways to handle your “corrupt town” scenario without anonymity that are concrete and not at all hypothetical.
It’s plenty easy to silence you when you’re anonymous and speaking out. Just look at what Twitter and Facebook did. And look at what Reddit does every single day.
Anonymity will always exist in corners of the internet. But it does not belong in the mainstream, easily accessible parts that most people use.
But I’m not even anonymous here. My name is Mike Keen, and my address isn’t hard to find.