I joined Google+ today with high hopes of networking without Facebook's we-own-you approach to our privacy. But now, Google is demanding we use our real names as usernames.

No.

Turns out that Israel has been mining social networking sites like Facebook to find pro-Palestinian activists' real names - and used that information to make (?how?) other countries refuse to let the activists leave for Israel.

Also, during the Syrian and Egyptian uprisings, some people who used social networking tools without using Tor or VPN got themselves tortured and murdered by their governments' security goons.

It's nice that most of you, white, well-off and well-established, foresee a life where no one will ever care what you say enough to attack you. But most of the world isn't like that. And frankly, neither is the UK, USA, Canada or Australia. You are safe and happy because you don't offend anyone who will come for you: governments, Scientology, anti-abortionist loonies, etc.

Try openly commenting about the Moonies or Scientology sometime, something that really makes them hurt. See why privacy and it's brother, secrecy, need to exist. The Supreme Court once upheld a right - anonymous pamphleting. The decision mentions that without the ability to speak anonymously to power without repercussion, the right to free speech is meaningless. And do note that the corporations or the loons or the cults or the government won't be handing out their addresses and phone numbers to you when they attack. Power gets to be anonymous and secret when they move on you. You should demand at least the abilty to speak anonymously. We used phones for over 125+ years without sharing our personal files with who we spoke; we never had to give it up to use the internet. We were just forced to do it.

Corporations are government-created entities, and exist as legal fictions at our convenience, not theirs. Their job is whatever we tell them it is. Their own theory is that they exist to make profit; nicely self-serving. They exist so that a group can perform actions without exposing individuals in the group to liability. Beyond that, they made the rest up. If they are becoming a pain, we could 1) regulate them or 2) dissolve them. Yessssss. We can unmake what favors we grant. Corporations are not independent life forms divorced from their makers. They are your pet dogs, and it's time you all start remembering that you are the masters, not the hounds. Corporations used to have regulated life spans and could be and were unmade when their purposes were done. They can be again. Immortal my ass.

Our US national phone companies didn't feel the need to track and log the phone calls of their customers for over one hundred and twenty-five years, and civilization and phone company infrastructure survived unscathed.

As for the need to track for purposes of managing bandwidth; expand the bandwidth so that it is not necessary. The present situation, managed artificial scarcity, exists to maximize profits and provide an excuse for governments to enforce surveillance on a scale never imagined by Orwell in his darkest nightmares or Stalin's maddest dreams. There is enormous profit in the current system being used to buy up content providers and competitors, instead of expanding the current capacity so that everyone can eat all they wish. You don't become a billionaire by providing vital communications bandwidth; you become a billionaire by throttling bandwidth to maximize profits. Regulate the profits and force them to expand their bandwidth to necessary levels.

If we allow this nonsensical excuse, bandwidth will never expand to the level we need, prices will go up, providers will "manage" us to an inch of our lives, and government/corporate power will monitor our every move until the day we die, and they will never, ever go away.