Lawmaker moves against the anonymous Internet

According to CNET, a lawmaker in Kentucky is pushing a bill that would require people to post only their real names to Web sites, lest the owners of the sites face legal repercussions.

Of course, this has a lot of people up in arms. The Internet has always been a haven for anonymous writing. Why would anyone want to limit that? Legal accountability, most likely, and a generation that dislikes the easy libel that the Internet often allows.

Why would we not want this kind of accountability? First of all, because the legislation would be worthless and impossible to enforce on locally, let alone a worldwide. Secondly, to maintain the discourse of a democratic society, there must exist an outlet for anonymous bitching. If all words can be traced to their source, and that source held accountable for all those words, the freedom of speech goes out the window.

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