The members of these virtual communities communicate through chat, email, newsgroups and lists. There is no measure by which other individuals within the community can judge the statements of anonymous members of the community as every statement is separate and disconnected from prior ones. To build and maintain a sense of community, developing some sense of familiarity is necessary. He provides examples demonstrating that the two independent values, identity and authenticity, are commonly linked together, especially by governments. However, he draws a subtle difference between the two, noting that it is possible and, in this instance desirable, to authenticate the individual's eligibility to participate in the community rather than authenticating the individual's identity.
Eligibility is independent of identity.
Governments are uneasy with this idea, preferring that eligibility be tied directly to the individual's true identity, not a pseudonymous identity, and they have placed requirements on ISPs to attempt to enforce their view. Like the Post Office, which requires proof of box holders' true identity, their goal seems to be one of disallowing pseudonymity. ISPs are then caught in the middle, attempting to meet the privacy needs of their customers and the disclosure requirements of the government. Many ISPs, Earthlink being one example, have instituted policies and practices which prevent their users from being able to relay mail through their systems to secondary email systems for pseudonymity. They provide their users with a mechanism close to what they gained through the use of a secondary email provider by spoofing the header to give the impression that the message originated from the secondary system although these solutions tend to keep too much information from the original header.