Google's anonymity ban defied by Thomas Jefferson The technology world loves to navel-gaze and think it's constantly breaking new ground, but as in the case of the recent debate over real names and anonymity on Google+, technology often plods over well-trodden ground. For example, if you dropped one of the American republic's "founding fathers" into the midst of the Google+ …
as an Identity Service G+ is already fundamentally flawed. My "name" on there is not one I can prove via Govt ID... is just happened to look/sound like an American name so hasn't caused a flame-out with their puritybots yet. Same for one of my Facebook profiles.
that name also hs email, twitter etc accounts and anyone who encounters me online knows no different, and people I meet in meatspace and want to connect to get let into the secret.
it enables me to keep my work and social life seperate - not for any nefarious reason just because I don't want to lose control of my identity for some online service to profit.
If Google are serious about becoming an identity service then they need to allow users to represent themselves how they choose (potentially in multiple ways accroding to what "circle" the observer is in) but maintain - if they so insist - a secure proof of the users real identity (in the US that would be Social Security, Drivers License, possibly credit card validation etc) ... of course given Googles propensity to divulge personal info without even requiring a court order I'd be worried about sharing too much with them
There was a very good reason for anonymity, and it was a matter of life and death: being challenged to a duel. Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by Burr in a duel, and I have no doubt that many of the critical pundits would also have been in duels if not for their anonymity. It is not merely the "freedom" of disassociation from the comments, but it preserves the critic's life as well.
Martin Nowak's work on the evolution of cooperation imply that large communities are likely to be destroyed by free riders without mechanisms for creating and advertising personal reputation. This is a result based on solid mathematics and validated by simulation experiments. I regard these kind of results as a lot more robust than listening to the opinions of the day. (Anyone who is interested should read Nowak's book, Supercooperators, for a review of his and others work in this field.)
In practice, the negative effect of the lack of a reputation process is clearly present on the net. We only need compare the average quality and civility of anonymous versus named commentators on blogs for a vivid demonstration of this. Outfits like eBay use reputation to weed out crooks and incompetents but the mechanism is actually corrective: we have probably all seen the strenuous attempts of eBay sellers to protect their reputation. This is the theory of cooperation in living detail.
Google's policy seems to me to be fundamentally good for the future of the Internet. I expect to see a time where groups will only allow interactions with people who have a good online reputation, for example, discussion groups only open to people with a G+ or similar validated identity and history. I expect to see systems evolving that allow a reputation to receive negative and positive points and for those attributions to be sourced to known individuals, so that an attribution is rated by the reputation of the giver (and back-rates the giver.) The maths and the systems are complex and will need to evolve but the potential benefits are enormous, and probably essential. The members of a traditional village can learn each other's reputation and protect and extend themselves appropriately for the interaction; a global village requires more sophisticated mechanisms.
As for the supposed attack on liberty, I'd say this: Liberty won't survive without good systems to protect it. Free riders will always have payoffs to rort large open systems unless they are detected and advertised. Google's real name policy does benefit Google but in the long run it is critical for us punters too. I'm happy for the monitoring and limiting of Google's use of our identities (and, despite it's large size, I'd generally rate Google's behaviour as pretty good, ymmv) but mechanisms for reputation are intrinsic to the survival of liberty. We all want the ability to free ride when it suits us, and, as Nowak shows, generosity is required for cooperation to persist, but it should be given by choice, not taken at will.
You are equating google+'s ban on identities without governmental identity backing with anonymity, which is patently false. It's been argued time and again that anonymity and pseudonymity are not quite the same thing, and google's ban punches out a lot more than complete "anonymity". Even your ebay example doesn't illustrate what you think it does, and as mentioned before, as most of the ebay usernames bear no resemblance at all to the real names google requires and in fact there are plenty of vendors with multiple accounts with independent reputation scores. On top of that, it's quite clear that forcing people to use their real names is no guarantee at all for playing nice, refraining from freeloading, basic civility, and so on. Otherwise, ID cards would have put paid to the police. Instead, such systems tend to be more prevalent in more oppressive and thus police-intensive states.
Your idea of a reputation score functions equally well without governmental ID backing and with whichever fantasy name anyone would choose to register with. So there is no reason to demand governmental ID. And every reason not to, as has also been expounded upon repeatedly. There are very valid reasons why people would like to have different online identities, each with a carefully built-up independent reputation. You're completely glossing over that google+ is doing its level best to prevent that, and instead force everyone to have at most exactly as many google+ accounts as they have legal identity papers.
In short, your appeal to theory falls quite short of the mark. If you want to make a cogent argument on this topic, please redo from start.
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