And while your at it please answer this ignorant question. If the government of any country wanted you to freeze peoples accounts until they provided proof of idedntity, can they legally force you to?
The nightmare scenario would be if, say, some foreign government declares some Ripple account held by someone who has violated that country's laws and insists we freeze that account. They could perhaps bring an action in a United States court or even threaten the lives of OpenCoin employees. If the network was decentralized, we'd have no ability to freeze accounts or make changes except in our own servers, which would just get outvoted by other servers.