Gotta disagree completely there. Completely ignoring all of the Free/Open VPN services (or the paid ones that accept bitcoin and care not what you put for your name), you can easily pick up a pre-paid phone with a data plan without submitting ID. Head over to XDA, grab an Android ROM to flash that'll let you turn said phone into a wifi router. (Or just hit the net from various hotspots.. McDonalds, coffee shops, etc).
There are PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously without breaking any laws. TOR is not some saviour here to free us all from oppression - it's merely a single tool that can be used to reach a collection of websites unavailable without TOR or a gateway. A tool that gets severely misused for very dirty purposes; but defenders try to point out that people use it for good things, too. Okay - so did anonymity and free speech not exist before TOR? Hardly. I personally dont support TOR because I see it as a black market of unethical pornography, drugs, and so forth - just with an optional feature of "anonymously" browsing. Same reason I won't support organizations like the NAACP or KKK - sure, each organization does some honestly good things; but for the most part I want no involvement in the racism and divisionist ideals.
Free/Open VPN services generally have known, individual organizations controlling them (making them susceptible to governments, coercion and probably corruption/bribery), limited/known points of failure & control (VPN providers generally have fairly small+stable set of servers they provide services out of), don't make you anonymous to the VPN provider/network (no onion routing through third party nodes or other solutions utilized), etc. They provide a
very limited form of anonymity, and honestly, do you really doubt such services aren't already covered under PRISM or similar projects? What well-funded, half-competent intelligence agency would let them slip by?
Hotspots and pre-paid mobile internet without provided ID are a little better, but aren't available everywhere (and the latter is becoming available in fewer places every year, sadly) but still have large risk factors in that they essentially provide decently specific time+physical location data, and usually places that provide wifi or prepaid mobile internet SIM cards have cameras, the combination of which is more than enough to identify you. This is (probably?) not much of an issue if you're concerned about criminal organizations tracking you, but represents an actual risk for people living under repressive governments, whistleblowers, etc.
And yes, you are right, Tor does get misused a lot. But the solution to the problem of misuse of technology is not to to severely restrict our outlaw it - you're just dealing with the symptoms, not the cause. And, again, while such measures would mean law-abiding persons wouldn't use it, the reality is that you'd just be creating a new black market - in anonymity. You'd inevitably get criminals selling access to botnet-backed onion routing networks and the like if you cracked down on anonymous web access hard enough... and if you're just cracking down on Tor, and there are "PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously" then what's to stop criminals from just using those ways instead? What's the point of going after just one particular anonymity service?
