I am only aware of two solutions:
1) proof of identity, tying accounts to real-world things that are hard or impossible to replicate
2) proof of work, tying accounts or actions to the ability to run computations
Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.
Proof of work can be defeated but has the possibility of preserving privacy.
3) micropayments
There are many issues with those, like the wildly different standards of living across the globe. OTOH anyone can acquire Monero if they want to. But someone from a rich country will likely be able to pay for more fake accounts/visits than someone from a poor country. With the ad market the difference between where the visitor is from is very important. Some ad clicks may cost a dollar if they're coming from a rich country and 0.01 cents if they're coming from a poor country.
I'm not suggesting cryptocurrency micropayments for accessing the web but it's on par with PoW in that it only requires money, not privacy.
Perhaps the way forward is for people to wake up and stop visiting sites that infringe on their privacy.
Fair enough, I didn’t think of that one. I suppose macropayments could be in the same bucket.
Analogous to hardware disparities and POW, wealth disparities make payment a toll but not a roadblock.
>Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.
All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is.
I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.
From what I've seen no such solution guarantees privacy to the user if the signing body (or the government) and the website collude to deanonymize the user.
What if the the government signs your private key but doesn't store the list of people who requested this?
Can you elaborate on how that would work exactly? What would the flow be - which party would request what from whom? Would there be technical assurances that no list is stored by the government?
Why are you skipping entirely over good old legislation and law enforcement against offenders, including diplomatic pressure for foreign offenders.
Not everything calls for a purely technical solution.