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>No more anonymous trolls, less disinformation/fewer manipulative botnets shaping public discourse, less aggressive behaviour in online games.

This assumption was tested extensively by several platforms, and it failed miserably all the way. You can still witness it yourself, on Facebook, where almost everybody posts under their own name and photo - and yet trolling, brigading, mass reporting, flamewars, and all other continue in force. Even worse, you'll find plenty of bot accounts on places like Twitter, with perfectly fine name and picture, while insightful and dissenting content is delivered by anonymous, or ironically branded, accounts.

The correct solution is to stop trying to shoehorn our preconceived notions from offline life to online activities - and to reminding individual users that power is in their hands. The solution to Eternal September is to teach and integrate newcomers - and sometimes to also gatekeep - rather than trying to become a campus police of sorts. The much different nature - the vastly larger scale - of the internet makes it entirely unsuitable to govern by offline intuition.

Counter proposal: We should do the exact opposite of everything in this post. The internet is good exactly in the ways it is not limited by RL. Using IRL ID is at best playing into advertisers hands, and at worst the aberration which is damaging the positive aspects of the internet.

>It's nothing more than an unhealthy vice

Poster's morality is subjective and geographically constrained. Definitely doesn't scale in relevance to a global network.

>people living unauthentic split lives with multiple incongruent personas

This is already the state of a person living in a consumer society. Adopting personas plucked from lifestyle marketing, just long enough to consume products (socially/publicly), before discarding said personas. Social media personas in their very congruence are synthetic and inauthentic, because they're built as audience pleasing product. People’s pre-social media compartmentalized internet personas are the closest humanity has come to authenticity.

>extension of reality with the same social dynamics

All social dynamics are historically contingent, so why is it axiomatic that they should apply to the internet, rather than have its own new and organic social dynamics or netiquette.

>The end result being that many of the problems we associate with the internet cease to exist.

Those problems almost immediately became magnitudes worse in the facebook/twitter age of RL ID.

>accountability

Who are these platforms to hold anyone accountable? What a colossal double standard. The users may be held accountable, but the platforms make their own rules. The platform which has the power to authenticate you has power over you. We’re better off with our own weak IDs.

It's cute that you think this is in any way achievable when the UK has left the EU. Your fantasy would require global cooperation. More chance of disarming nuclear weapons.

You need to prove who you are to take part. No verification means no internet to you. It's a barrier to entry to get in the system in the first place. Immigrants won't be able to use the internet for months upon first arrival in the UK. Your identity is stolen so you can't report it because you're locked out of the system. How do you prove you are 'you'? I don't believe you are you.

Lack of anonymity breeds fear and intimidation if you step out of line. It causes self-censorship for fear of reprisals if you don't adhere to acceptable policy.

You see such intimidation and self-censoring from the people of Communist China who don't speak up due to actors overseas who will intimidate them.

This whole thing is the death of the UK internet access freedoms.