I don't feel something to that extreme is necessary. But I do believe something similarly controversial, which is: platforms which host user generated content

I don't feel something to that extreme is necessary. But I do believe something similarly controversial, which is: platforms which host user generated content should be required to enforce strong know-your-customer on UGC submission. That doesn't mean other users should be able to click on my HackerNews profile and see my real name, but at minimum the service provider should be required to have that information; to map an account back to a real person (though, I strongly believe people behave more positively when their name is known to everyone they're interacting with; its actually a good thing, overwhelmingly but not totally of course). Argument against: right to anonymity. I don't feel this is a right any human has ever had in contexts of interpersonal communication. Moreover, I don't feel its a desirable right to uphold. HackerNews is a public square; anyone is welcome to join and talk. But public squares always had an element of accountability; I, being human and present in the physical plane of existence, had to travel there in person, accountable to anyone else there listening, authorities patrolling the square, etc. The only examples of anonymity in the non-digital are niche; masked protestors, maybe, but even that involves physical presence where improper conduct could be responded to by authorities unmasking the individual. Books published anonymously? Possibly, but... Here's my strongest argument for it: there will always be platforms to express yourself truly anonymously. American law is written in absolutes, but is rarely enforced so; speeding is illegal, but I speed every day. Piracy is illegal, yet my NAS over there has twelve terabytes of totally legitimately obtained content. They've gone after the Pirate Bay more times than I can count, and its still there, at the same domain. The point is not to build a totalitarian internet with one world government user registration; it's to correlate accountability with scale. Larger platforms have super-linear correlation with their ability to inflict real-world pain on their users (and those their users interact with nonconsensually). Larger platforms also tend to be built by corporations who have a difficult time escaping laws like this. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it actually fall? If revenge porn is uploaded to a fly-by-night no-name site and no one sees it, was harm created? I'd argue Yes; but it's an improvement over our current situation of the tree falling and everyone hearing it.