They Want Your Real Name

Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security, wants to know who you really are. Not your username—your actual name, verified and on file somewhere. It would solve everything, he thinks. Misinformation would vanish. Trolls would behave. The whole internet would finally grow up.

The sales pitch is gentle enough: verified pseudonymity. Your real identity stays registered and checked, but you can still use a username if you want. It’s a compromise, see? The structure without the total erasure of privacy. Neat. Reasonable. Probably fine.

Except every place that’s actually built this system has ended up with a surveillance state. China has it. North Korea has it. Iran has it. Once you’ve got a registry of who said what and when, a government knows exactly who to target. Dissidents disappear. Minorities get tracked. The same infrastructure that catches assholes also catches anyone the government decides is inconvenient. It’s not a glitch in the system—it’s the point.

And for what? Real-name policies didn’t even fix the problems they claimed to. South Korea tried it, gave it up. You still get misinformation. You still get cruelty. You just get it with a complete ledger of who’s responsible, which sounds nice until you realize who gets to hold that ledger.

The internet was supposed to be a place where you could think dangerous thoughts without your government knowing, say unpopular things without your boss finding out, be someone other than who you were supposed to be. Not always good—anonymity made people cruel. But it also made people free, in a way that being fully legible and registered doesn’t.

King’s probably sincere. He’s not trying to build a police state. He just thinks good policies and careful procedures will keep a surveillance tool from becoming a weapon. Which is what everyone thinks, always, right before it does.