Google’s Real Name Registration Policy Halted By Criticism

Google’s real name registration policy will not come to direct fruition. Google actively campaigned to have users register accounts with their real names. Now company executive Vint Cert says that policy will not be employed.

Speaking to Reuters, the Google executive said Google’s real name registration policy would not work in certain cases. The company’s ‘chief Internet evangelist’ admits that Google executives internally debated the issue but ultimately gave in to criticisms.

According to Vint, the Google real name registration policy did not take into consideration certain cases in which an pseudonym was helpful. In the end, the team at Google decided that “choice is important” for all internet users of its various platforms.

So what exactly did Google discover? Users in countries with oppressive governments could encounter “fatal trouble” for revealing their real names.

Google executives also admit that real names are sometimes useful, Cerf notes:

“Anonymity and pseudonymity are perfectly reasonable under some situations. But there are cases where in the transactions both parties really need to know who are we talking to.”

Google has still only approved the use of pseudonyms for a small number of Google users. At one point, the company is believed to have toyed with the idea of requiring government issued IDs in order for users to open a Google+ account and to maintain current accounts.

On the one hand, anonymity is important to many internet users. On the other hand, we could cut down on a lot of spam is accounts need to be verified with official government issued identification.

Cerf concludes his interview by noting that Google much find a way to “authenticate who the parties are” for each account, while at the same time allowing for anonymity when and where it may be required.

The Google real name policy dates back to 2011 when the search giant attempted to convince new Google+ users to register with their real names.

Do you think Google real name registration would solve a lot of problems with spam and other account issues or just create more issues down the road?