Neither is true any longer. It is possible, with minimal ingenuity, to get access to the internet without identifying yourself. With a little more technical expertise, it is possible to communicate online through intermediaries–anonymous remailers–in such a way that the message cannot be linked to the sender. Once online, there are ways to communicate with large numbers of people at near zero cost: mass email, posts on Usenet news, a page on the worldwide web. And if you choose to abandon anonymity and spread lies under your own name, access to the internet is so inexpensive that it is readily available to people without enough assets to be worth suing.