[pak]

Both of your points are hyperbolic claims with no warrant.

> Communication mediums are the safest thing in the whole wide world.

Even though this is a strawman, since my arguing to the contrary does nothing to support that anonymity is or isn't a natural right, you're still completely wrong. Perhaps I can't literally shoot someone with a computer, but all kinds of violence is inflicted by communication. You can harass, threaten, and blackmail simply by communicating. The internet has been used to inflict sexual abuse, aid hate crime, and transmit child pornography. It can also be used to steal, commit fraud, and induce an unsafe panic (think of shouting fire in a crowded theater). These are all non-physical but violent acts; incidentally, anonymity aids in perpetrating every one of them. Saying that the internet is inherently safe, much less the safest thing in the whole wide world, is patently false.

> History is very clear on this: the biggest enemies of justice have been governments and state sponsored entities, every single time.

Perhaps you can add up the numbers and claim that more suffering has been inflicted in total by governments (in the course of wars, or whatever, some of which were more justifiable than others) rather than isolated individuals. You'd have a serious sampling bias, though, because we generally owe recorded history to the presence of a government, and people seem to have preferred throughout recorded history to form governments rather than live as individuals. So while this is a nice setup for an anarchistic manifesto, unless you are seriously willing to give up government and then move to Antarctica (which has pretty bad Internet, I'm told), it doesn't really make sense for this discussion.

[etherael]

> Perhaps you can add up the numbers and claim that more suffering has been inflicted in total by governments (in the course of wars, or whatever, some of which were more justifiable than others) rather than isolated individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.

[malandrew]

So what you're saying is that the internet is a tool, and like all tools they can be used for both good and evil. That being said, how is it different from a knife that can be used as easily to cut food to murder someone? We don't regulate knives despite the danger they occasionally present. We value the convenience and utility of being able to acquires knives whenever, wherever and for whatever we want more than the safety afforded by regulating knives to prevent stabbings. The internet is an even more versatile tool than knives and regulating it will do more harm than good.