[domador]

As with many detractors of anonymity, it seems that you're assuming that the authorities and neighbors you'll deal with will always be virtuous, and not corrupt nor vindictive toward opponents. Maybe you'd like to expose the town's government's corruption or mismanagement at the town hall, but the town is run by a family with a lot of influence and power over everything that happens within the town. You live in the town, fear for your safety, and have no good way of anonymously opposing their corruption, so you stay silent and they get to keep their power.

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.

[k33n]

I think you’re living in 2010, man. Public discourse in the digital town square is completely destroyed in 2026.

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.