I think the fundamental issue is identification. The government cannot effectively regulate your interaction with the internet if you cannot be identified. The

I think the fundamental issue is identification. The government cannot effectively regulate your interaction with the internet if you cannot be identified. There seem to be different viewpoints: one is that the government should not try to regulate your interaction with the internet at all. Another that comes up is that it should regulate you, but only in certain special circumstances, which have different definitions of what those things are. For example, more people want the government to regulate your interaction with the internet in regards to CSAM. Some people want you to always be identified so that you can't enter sites that might be deemed too adult for you. Then the other aspect of this is, for people who want you to be identified on the internet, how exactly does that work. The worst aspect of this seems to me to be that that is kind of an afterthought, or poorly designed. Leaking social security numbers is not acceptable. I feel like generally people want the government to stay out of it. Except for some people, there are specific things they DO want regulated. As more and more of our lives go online, we may come to the conclusion that we do want robust identification online. We have state and federal identification systems based on physical cards and numbers. I wonder if there has been any attempt to modernize these systems to make them cryptographically secure, biometrically verifiable, or anything like that. I guess practically speaking, due to the extreme abuse and incompetence we have seen from government so far, I am currently in the "please just stay out of it" camp. But as virtual and augmented reality picks up over the coming years, we may get to a point where so much happens online that we decide we need a robust "online government". Or maybe the online world will prove that something more like anarchy or self regulation works?