Not all are bad, but they are frequently abused to not only protect privacy, but to protect against legitimate legal need. It is like hiring a contractor on your house who gives you a false name so they can skip out of town when you figure out they cheated you. There is no legitimate purpose for that degree of privacy. They wanted privacy for the express purpose of providing you no legal recourse.
Pseudonymity is perfectly valid, but there needs to be efficient, effective, and crystal clear means to pierce it and find the actual humans making the decisions with intent when there is a legitimate and well-supported legal need.
Can you cite any research on just how frequent you mean by "frequently". It certainly happens sometimes, but I have found no evidence that is is the norm.
Why does that matter? I said that pseudonymity is perfectly fine, there just needs to be a straightforward and effective means of piercing it when there are legitimate legal purposes. Are you arguing that because it is not a majority of cases that they should be impervious even if there are legitimate legal purposes?
There are enough high profile cases of shell corporations being used for unsavory and explicitly illegal behavior, to the extent that it is literally a meme, such as the crimes unveiled in the Panama Papers [1] that simple and robust mechanisms to prevent abuse are warranted even if abuse is uncommon. It is not like being able to pierce the privacy with a court order is even some new mechanism, you can already do that, it is just expensive, time-consuming, and difficult if they fight.
The cost of providing such mechanisms and properly securing them against abuse have to be weighed against the benefit. In order to know the benefit, we need to know the size of the problem we are seeking to solve, and whether or not the proposed system would actually solve the problem. So yes, knowing the size of the problem matters a lot, and is a good first step to running a cost benefit analysis.
Excellent, since you wish to run a cost-benefit analysis you can first start by citing the research you used to conclude that the abuses of the current system are small. That would give us a baseline for analysis.
It is then easy for you to take the first step in the cost-benefit analysis you wish to do by estimating the costs. The proposal is that a court order demanding disclosure, which are already routinely issued, can not be stalled indefinitely through the application of lawyers. So, all you need to do is identify the balance of cases where disclosure is fought and then see how often the disclosure results in illegitimate harm to the disclosed party versus how often it results in the discovery of legitimate harms caused by the disclosed party.
The disclosures in the Panama Papers alone resulted in 1.2 billion dollars of recovered taxes [1]. So you can compare the estimated costs against the benefits of preventing a singular incident for now. If you can present credible evidence that the harms of requiring disclosure on legitimate court orders is in excess of that, then a broader analysis of the problem size if warranted.
They didn't volunteer to do your homework. You were originally asked for a citation on
> frequently abused to not only protect privacy, but to protect against legitimate legal need
Shell corporations are used for unsavory purposes being a meme is not proof of this as was implied by your other comment. Also 1.2B in taxes is pocket change so it doesn't really help your point.
Pseudonymity is perfectly valid, but there needs to be efficient, effective, and crystal clear means to pierce it and find the actual humans making the decisions with intent when there is a legitimate and well-supported legal need.