The Trapdoor
Julian King, then the EU Commissioner for Security Union, sent a letter in early 2018 calling for what he described as "privacy-preserving real-name registration" online. His letter, published by the digital rights organization EDRi, proposed bringing anonymity and accountability into balance through verified pseudonymity.
The framing is careful. He doesn’t say you’d have to post under your real name. He says you’d have to register your legal identity so that authorities could trace the pseudonym back to you.
The distinction matters, and also doesn’t. The chilling effect would be identical: knowing that your online persona is attached, in some database, to your legal name. That’s not anonymity. That’s a trapdoor built into anonymity—one that only the state can open, until the moment it can’t.
The political backdrop was the 2018 cycle of legitimate panic about disinformation, bot networks, and radicalization pipelines. Real problems. But the proposed cure has a consistent track record of failing to address them while doing reliable harm elsewhere. Studies of real-name policies have repeatedly found they don’t reduce harassment, because most harassment already comes from people using their real names. What they do accomplish is exposing everyone who has a practical reason for cover: journalists in hostile environments, queer people whose families don’t know, abuse survivors, whistleblowers, people who rebuilt their lives under different identities.
China, Iran, and North Korea run heavily monitored internet systems where meaningful anonymity is effectively impossible. These aren’t edge cases or distant hypotheticals—they’re the mature endpoint of the logic King was proposing. His framing was about disinformation. You don’t have to be conspiratorial to notice that governments with an interest in knowing who their critics are find real-name registration exceptionally useful.
The strongest argument against it is also the most obvious: anonymity is often the structural precondition for honesty. People say things under pseudonyms that they couldn’t say under their legal names—not because they want to abuse someone, but because the cost of public disclosure is too high. Support communities, political dissent, creative writing that doesn’t fit your professional identity, the kind of confession you can only make when it isn’t attached to your name. All of this exists because the internet, for a while, offered some structural distance between who you are and what you say.
That distance is already eroding through behavioral tracking, data brokers, and platform agreements nobody reads. Formalizing the erosion through a verified registration system doesn’t fix the underlying problems. It just makes the surveillance official and legal.