Agreed with about everything Bill said.
A domain name is not a requirement to speak anonymously on the internet.
This is the fatally flawed assumption in most privacy arguments, including Karl's. ICANN long ago made the policy decision that Internet domains are property, not identity. As such they can (and should) be treated with the same requirements of ownership disclosure as other forms of intellectual property, which by and large are publicly searchable. Functionally (if not technically), WHOIS shouldn't have disclosure policies much different from TESS <http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4005:890zev.1.1>. Such a mechanism may lead one to proxies, but those proxies must themselves provide accurate information that can ultimately, as required, ultimately give a trusted path back to the source. Personally, I like the middle ground of CIRA, the Canadian ccTLD that has different disclosure policies for individials and organizations. It allows individual registrants to hide criticlal parts of WHOIS for casual lookups, but does not offer that facility to organizations. In doing so, it still demands accurate WHOIS data. - Evan