An alternative strategy would be to crack down on the money laundering channels used by criminal entities to get money from their victims, but this would be politically difficult as it would involve shutting down grey-market banks that are well used by the ultra wealthy to evade taxes and pay bribes.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korea-s-apt38-hacking-gr...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/01/politics/north-korea-cyberatt...
Connections between specific Russian financial crime organizations and the Russian government are much harder to pin down as people who try to investigate ties between the Russian mob and the Russian government often wind up dead. However, the Russian government is well known to be tightly linked connected to Russian organized crime[0]. Given the sheer scale of Russian financial fraud operations--Carbanak stole upwards of a billion USD[1]--the balance of probabilities suggest these operations exist with the tacit approval of the Russian government.
[0] https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2019/12/16/gangs-and-gulags-how-vla...
[1] https://securityintelligence.com/carbanak-how-would-you-have...
This is a huge downside. Anonymous publishing is a very important right.
> This is a huge downside. Anonymous publishing is a very important right.
It also wouldn't work. Or rather, at best it would only work as well as political campaign message attribution does (and that's with considerable enforcement muscle aimed at it).
Somehow "dark money" often manages to evade these efforts, and evade the consequences of violations, and I wouldn't expect transnational phishing and scams to be any different.
Which isn't to say that we should stop trying, but sacrificing the capability of the general public for anonymous speech in return for dubious-at-best attribution by well-heeled actors seems like a poor tradeoff.
If you create a git repo, the first branch’s name is a controversial political issue.
“Everything’s political” ~ What’s-his-face the communist in Fiddler on the Roof after introducing “Will you marry me?” as “a political question.”
What prevents the violent psychopath from killing the child they see to get their lollipop when they want something sweet? The fact that there are repercussions. What prevents those that have no qualms about stealing from a store from doing so most of the time (even those that steal don't do it every time they enter a store)? The same.
Similarly, the answer on the net is not to stop bad actors from being bad. It's to punish and hold accountable those that do bad things. That avoids the "thoughtcrime" problem, and makes space for actual freedom.
The only thing we have to lose is privacy for domain owners. Seems like a trade-off worth considering.