I hate to cite the facts, but... (Score 1)

The article doesn't say that the government is the one collecting this information. The content providers themselves do this. (Mind you, it sounds like the gov. has the right to look at your records any time someone makes a "complaint", so this may be a pointless distinction in reality, see my rant below)

The article also doesn't say anything about requiring a credit card as part of the registration process -- it simply provides that as one possiblility (the others being a "digital signature -- whatever that gets legislated to mean -- or a standard government ID).

Now that I've shown that it's not as bad as it seems, I'll tell you why it's worse than it looks...

The scary thing is (well, the first scary thing, there are a few) the way this is likely to work in the real world. It costs money to run a "registration service", especially if there are government-defined hoops you need to jump through. A lot of people will just decide that it isn't worth it, and pull their information off the web. The sad part is that these will most likely be the non-profits and artistic sites, not the "Cum-guzzling teen sluts" (register that, you bastards!) that most (uninformed) people where thinking about when they passed this law.

The scary thing (part 2 in a series) is that even the people who stay online and register users are unlikely to maintain the databases themselves -- they'll contract out to another company (like AdultCheck). Competition will slowly drive most of these companies out of business. Then there are maybe a half dozen companies with the keys to our privacy. And these companies depend on their government licence to stay in business. So when the police ask for "just a peek" into the database (without a warrant, of course), they'll have the implicit them down if they say no.

The (third and final) scary thing about this is that the list of offensive material is likely to be a lot longer than most (again, uninformed) people think. This isn't just about "pornography"! This is where the online community is failing in its education efforts. Most people love this kind of law. Whenever you can say "but, what about the children", you've automatically got most of the public on your side. (see "drug war", "gun control", "COPA" for details) It takes a lot of activism on our part to counteract that.

There is one major benefit of this legislation for the linux community. All of these registered users will be counted in the new W2K server pricing model, driving prices up dramatically and forcing even more webmasters to dump their IIS for Linux/Apache!