Google name service would be cause for alert

[Commentary] CEO Eric Schmidt has spent the summer sharing increasingly creepy thoughts with the public. Earlier this month, at the Techonomy conference, this statement of Schmidt's about anti-social behavior was widely quoted: "The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a (verified) name service for people. Governments will demand it." On first blush, this may not sound so horrible - anonymity has allowed trolls, bigots and screamers to flourish online, and who wouldn't want to tamp that down? But political dissidents in oppressive countries - the kinds of places where governments are most likely to "demand" a name service - may not think so highly of Schmidt's idea.