I should add that I do not think anyone should be hacking anyone. Some people might be in it for the credit cards, others for the internet fame of "taking down PSN" yet a few actually think they are doing good.
This is a fallacy. For every attack against a company another politician is swayed against net neutrality. Every dollar that Sony loses will be matched by themselves and other companies that would love to see nothing more than all of anon's meeting places struck from the web. And to top it off many of these people know nothing about how the internet actually functions.
Once upon a time a group of pranksters took over the Life, the Universe and Everything forum on gamefaqs. After many suspended accounts, account suicides and an exodus away from gamefaqs these people migrated to somethingawful, fark, ytmnd, gaiaonline and more than likely here. Some grew up, others did not. Many probably went to 4chan and then Anonymous from there.
Now imagine that ISPs, or governments could restrict or block access to any site or forum they think Anonymous could be using. All of the careful moderation here would mean nothing if someone high up got it into their head that the escapist could be a meeting ground for them. Fark would be toast. reddit, digg, any of the websites I listed earlier could go down or just have their incoming bandwidth reduced to nothing.
No lives are lost when Sony gets hacked, but it is terrorism none the less. Anonymous, or splinters of it or whatever are trying to use fear, theft and vandalism to change the culture of Sony, and of other companies. What they fail to remember is that people en masse are not afraid of these tactics. You can threaten a man into cowardice, but not a population. They will fight back. Sadly, Anonymous is well named, and often times only a sacrificial lamb is given up for slaughter while more attacks are hatched.
The people who feel attacked will turn away from the attackers and instead focus on where the attackers came from. Sadly, that is us.