The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it

"To cover American tech policy over the past few years has been to watch a series of individually dangerous waves of regulation and political operations roll toward an inevitable convergence. To cover American tech policy over the past few months is to watch those waves collide invisibly beneath the surface and head squarely in the direction of the nearest population center, with no storm warning in sight."

"At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America's second-most-populous state, Texas. While it's easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech."

A convergence of regulatory and political actions is accelerating legal changes that enable identity verification online and weaken longstanding protections for anonymity. The Supreme Court ended a two-decade precedent shielding online anonymity by ruling that age verification for adult websites imposes a negligible speech burden under the First Amendment. That ruling permits such laws in many states, including populous Texas. A later move allowed Mississippi to temporarily extend age-verification requirements to social media platforms. These legal shifts lower barriers to imposing ID checkpoints online and raise concerns about erecting obstacles to lawful expression.

Read at The Verge