Hacker News Reader

Comment by paperwasp42 | Hacker News Reader

This sort of legislation is bound to result in two things:

1) Cyber criminals outsmarting the identification and verification mandates, because they're criminals, they're crafty, and they don't give a crap about breaking the laws.

2) Law-abiding citizens who might be whistleblowers, victims of stalking, or have other very genuine reasons for wanting to hide their personal information will be unable to register a website without putting themselves in danger.

This sort of legislation, while possibly well-intentioned, helps no one (except for stalkers, people who get a thrill out of doxxing, and corrupt organizations wanting to silence whistleblowers).

View on HN

Doubt is it well intentioned at all. Governments want to quash unapproved speech. This makes it easier for them to do so.

Years ago I received an email from my registrar Net4India for my .in domain that my Government mandates that information submitted to WHOIS DB must be genuine and failing to comply would get the domain cancelled or something like that.

I couldn't find more info about that mandate, Not sure whether the Registrar took upon itself to issue such statements based on Government's order for the registrars to maintain accurate information of the customers(Which isn't same as the info we provide for WHOIS per domain).

Anyways, I stopped buying .in domains, Privacy is a fundamental right in India now and so I'm not sure if the mandate can be applied even if its true. Registrars here are offering privacy redaction now.

Something like this always happens when some new regulation happens. Thinking of legislators as idiots and fear mongering.

The second thing won't happen because "anonymous websites", in this context, doesn't mean anonymous from general public but anonymous from governments.

Anonymous bank accounts are also banned so do you also argue that law-abiding citizens who might be whistleblowers, victims of stalking, or have other very genuine reasons for wanting to hide their personal information will be unable to register a bank account without putting themselves in danger?

They are after group 2. They know this will not stop group 1.

This image of controlling Internet speech by Ben Garrison always comes to mind:

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/976837-reddit

3) people in between (i.e. not quite law abiding and not quite cyber criminals, or just people who value anonymity) are driven underground, or start using other anonymised means of putting content online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com