One of my favorite moments in Franz Kafka’s The Trial is shortly after the protagonist Josef K is placed under arrest for an unnamed offense. The men notifying him of his arrest don’t cuff him or take him to jail. They just tell him proceedings are underway and that he’ll learn everything in due course.

The only thing K can think to do is present the men his identity papers, but all he can find to show them is his bicycle license: “If this is a farce, he was going to play along.”

That’s what Google’s identity policy for Google+ has felt like over the last weeks: a farce. It has been genuinely Kafkaesque, in the proper darkly comedic sense of the term. (Kafka’s true heir in our times is probably Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David.)

Almost four weeks ago, at the end of July, we first looked at Google+’s identity policy, after Google’s Bradley Horowitz announced coming changes in enforcement, allowing users whose profiles were flagged for name violations a chance to correct them before suspension. Horowitz also promised further iterations and greater transparency in the future.

Thursday night, Google’s Saurabh Sharma announced the first significant change in the enforcement policy: a four-day grace period between notice of a violation and suspension, during which users can change their profiles to align them with the policy.

So what Google promised weeks ago now has a defined time window. Other than that, very little has changed. There is no clear way for users to flag profiles for name violations other than “Impersonation” or “Fake Profile,” neither of which seems to fit the target case of pseudonyms or nonstandard names.

Without a clear path to redefine its names policy, Google is effectively asking for extra time so it can muddle through.

Meanwhile, in what’s increasingly been dubbed the “Nym Wars,” opponents to Google’s insistence on “real names” on Plus rallied and organized:

• The EFF’s Jillian York wrote “A Case for Pseudonyms,” with particular attention to political activists, some of whom have been booted from Facebook for name-policy violations.
  
• “My Name Is Me” became a primary portal, featuring a range of individual stories and general arguments defending the right to pseudonymity and alternative names on social media.
  
• Microsoft Social Media Researcher Danah Boyd added “‘Real Names’ Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” Boyd noted that users of alternative names online are overwhelmingly likely to be members of disempowered groups, and that teens and people of color still frequently use nicknames or handles on Facebook without anyone noticing.

  Facebook’s origins in a closed network of Ivy League college students encouraged a culture of real names. That foundation helped it normalize that convention when it further opened up. Google+ opened initially to a vocal post-collegiate tech-savvy community, many of whom didn’t like Facebook and who had well-established conventions for using handles on online forums, Twitter and gaming sites. Naturally, this provoked a vocal backlash when Google tightened things up to make things more like Facebook.

• Following Boyd’s look at multicultural naming norms, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes zeroed in on how Facebook uses “soft power” to encourage use of real names: “Users who choose to go by their commonly used names are probably more likely to have a full Facebook experience, simply because more people they know will find them and interact with them.”
  
• The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal thinks Facebook and Google’s approach to naming isn’t just radical for online communities, but for any community. “[I]n real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don’t become part of the searchable Internet.” (For a skeptical take on this claim, see Alan Jacobs’ response).

Finally, South Korea is abandoning its nationwide real-name plus resident-registration-number system for internet users following the theft of 35 million users’ personal data. Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin called it “the country’s worst online security breach in history.”

The potential for these security breaches are one reason Google affirmed its commitment to supporting anonymous, pseudonymous and fully identified profiles in February. It hasn’t extended a similarly multitiered approach to Google+, even though its Circles architecture for limiting sharing would seem to allow it, or even imply it.

So what exactly is Google worried about?

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