Vint Cerf, Father of internet says “Anonymity and pseudonymity are perfectly reasonable” May be .africa should learn
Speaking recently to Reuters in an interview, Vint Cerf, a senior Google executive better known as a “father of the Internet.”, acknowledged that the search giant’s increasing push in the past 18 months to institute real-name authentication for Google+ and other services has sparked intense debate within its Mountain View, California, headquarters. Google has also been strongly encouraging users to merge their accounts on YouTube, Gmail and other Google properties into a single Google+ identity.
The debate as to whether to institute use of real names in the online namespace to identify individuals has received intense opposition from internet users who prefer the use of pseudo names to fight for freedom. Vint also argued that Google’s current name policy allows for some users to display pseudonyms and therefore offers adequate “choice” in how users choose to represent themselves. On the contrary he thinks that “Using real names is useful, but I don’t think it should be forced on people, and I don’t think we do.”
The use of pseudo names and online identities has been a forte of online users especially when under an oppressive regime or a closed up system that would potentially victimize individuals who tries to speak out, Dr. Cerf is in cognizance of the detriment of using real names that could land social media users under oppressive regimes in “fatal trouble,” and says Google will not enforce its policy in such instances..
In the case of the .africa , the DotConnectAfrica principle has been accused of using a fake identity by several individuals including a blogger. She however defended her action saying that she had been forced to use a pseudo name due to hostility that she had received from people who didn’t like her intervention on the African gTLD and had attempted to block her in instances that includes a certain African mailing list.
“At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led Net crackdown,” Says Cerf while writing in a CNN.com editorial in December. The internet namespace has to remain fairly and reasonably free. In the WCIT data and personality was part of a major fight, conservative governments sought tighter controls while more liberal governments like the US we keen on maintaining freedom of internet.
Internet could be a real place to read the mood of the customers as they critique services and organizations must take more seriously how they messages that have been posted in the blogs or through social media.
