That's not an excuse to add unaccountable 3rd parties to the mix that will take videos of your face and pictures of your IDs just to use the internet, and who will subsequently lose control of that data in inevitable breaches.
It's also doesn't justify any additional chilling of free speech.
Google is one of the few free mail+everything+else providers that still lets people sign up and not give any kind of real-world identity. So you can, on a clean phone or laptop or whatever, create a new gmail account without any kind of auth and maintain that persona.
In practice this isn't how people are using google services though.
I made a Google account without even owning a number a few days ago. Afaik only one of my Google accounts has a phone number and pretty sure that's only because AdSense.
My tinfoil hat theory is that if it doesn't ask for a phone number then it already has a very precise shadow profile about you. Being on linux+firefox+grapheneos compared to windows+chrome+android probably means a lot in that regard.
Except this is giving up anonymity, first, everywhere, not on a few sites. Two, the goal is to find an excuse to arrest you, not to get you to buy a birthday present for your niece when it's time. Well, that, and (this is Australia) to refuse you medical care because you looked up "best cigarette" 10 years ago, as well as refuse you unemployment because you Googled "how do people fake a handicap" after watching office space, 20 years ago.
> pretty much every site like Google already knows exactly who you are
Depends how much you share with Google when signed in. If I log out of Google services and browse around the web, my browsing activity is not recorded against my Google account.
You're missing the point. If one wants to be anonymous there are ways to do so. If we willingly give up anonymity in exchange for free in certain cases, that's our prerogative, but we must have the choice of not needing to do, when necessary.
It's also doesn't justify any additional chilling of free speech.