I haven't given this too much thought but it strikes me that it is the medium rather than the message or messenger that is troubling. It just might be difficult for people to understand the internet.<p>Think about it this way- we have no idea if someone is writing an opinion piece in the newspaper under a pseudonym. Sure, we could take it up with the newpaper legally, but that doesn't really change anything, and that might be the only difference between a newspaper and google in this case; google couldn't find out exactly who it was, but a newspaper should know.<p>Or, someone in academia could be completely faking credentials, name, tenure, experience and without diligence we wouldn't be aware. Again, it is more verifiable than someone leaving anonymous responses on Yelp or Google, but is that the main difference then? if we can reference check that person?<p>Another, maybe more naive way for me to think about this is that when I manage a team I don't make rules to stop the edge case/corner case behavior...you give guidelines and a high level overview of what acceptable behavior is. Otherwise you end up with a really strict, really rigid environment with rules that no one can comprehend or follow for some reason that no one can remember. No one wants to live in that environment. If we enact legislature to stop extremely low percentage behavior we end up in a similar spot politically. Not sure it is a solid argument, but it seems to make sense, roughly.