The Trust Foundation Understanding trust issues in the digital era.

Is online anonymity something that should be banned? Officials in Korea believe so. The New York Times reports on the suicide of Korean star Choi Jin-sil in their October 12th edition. Authorities and close family members and friends concluded that her suicide was a direct result of hateful or hurtful message board and social network posts which others had been able to make anonymously, hiding behind fictional identities.

For those unfamiliar with Korea, Ms. Choi was regarded as something of a national sweetheart, and the loss was felt across the country. Online harassment has generally been seen as a big problem in Korea, as the article points out: "To battle online harassment, the government’s Communications Commission last year ordered Web portals with more than 300,000 visitors a day to require its users to submit their names and matching Social Security numbers before posting comments.". There is now talk of new proposed legislation that would even further crack down on messages that are perceived as being hateful or hurtful. According to The Hollywood Reporter: "If the law, which might be tabbed the Choi Jin-sil law, is put into effect, real-name registrations would be mandatory for most news Web sites, and operators of all Internet portals would be required to delete opinions found to be defamatory within 24 hours."

The justification clearly is that by tying a real world identity to online accounts, people can be held accountable for what they do and say online, much as they are in the real world. The implication of this system is that people will be held accountable for online actions, unless it is purely a scare tactic or if enforcing anti-harassing laws proves impossible. Is the anonymity enjoyed by most of the web's users today a soon-to-be-dated remnant of a temporary phase of the Internet? That question in itself is interesting, since when you really dig down into it, few supposedly anonymous web users truly are anonymous--through IP tracking and ISP records, real world identities are routinely tied to supposedly anonymous personas. Is the destiny of the web for individuals online identity to match their online identity? One would think that despite the downsides of letting users hide behind a mask, users will not easily let go of their desire for anonymity--in Internet culture, the right to anonymity is an unspoken but sacred tenet. To cap it all off, regulating the internet seems like an impossible and futile task, not that authorities in many countries haven't tried it before or will cease to keep trying.