As of last Thursday it is now illegal (in the US) to anonymously annoy people online. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you do something that someone else regards as an annoyance, and you don’t disclose your true identity, you can be liable for a fine or a maximum two years imprisonment.

This can only be seen as a real erosion of First Amendment rights in the US: there are often good reasons for anonymity or pseudonymity, and by demanding that people identify themselves it will dramatically reduce willingness to publish opinion.

In reality there is no need to pass law to stop online harassment; service providers can enforce their Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policies in order to curtail what they deem to be misbehaviour of their own users. Furthermore as the world becomes more connected, it will become less and less practical to paper over the cracks to keep people from sending us speech that we don’t want to accept. For example, we’d no doubt love it if this law could cover spam — which most of us would consider to be an extreme annoyance — however this is clearly totally impactical. The only way ahead is accepting that people can publish pretty much what they like, and figure out ways to deal with that.

Read the article for more, I’m no Declan McCullagh.