Anonymity and the Presumption of Innocence

is this a catch-22? In the United States, in order to legally enter this country you must provide identification. In essence, we presume that it might be illegal for you to enter, so we must check to make sure we know who you are first.

But we have no such standard on the internet. For better or for worse, this means that people can exploit our internet and do damaging things anonymously, as we presume anonymous persons are innocent. I would argue that as a result many platforms are requiring you to authenticate because these platforms do not make such a presumption. Further, the internet is automatically becoming more closed regardless of our attempts to keep it open.

The people who are closing the internet to anonymity, are not necessarily owned by our government. In essence our internet is being increasingly controlled by parties unknown. It's hard for me to follow this course into the future and not see there will be even worse problems than we have now with this blanket presumption of innocence for all parties unknown.

Don't get me wrong. An Internet that is controlled by an authortarian regime may be even worse. It's just there seems to be a catch-22 at play right now.