wilwheaton:

“For 4 years, Koreans enacted increasingly stiff real-name commenting laws, first for political websites in 2003, then for all websites receiving more than 300,000 viewers in 2007, and was finally tightened to 100,000 viewers a year later after online slander was cited in the suicide of a national figure. The policy, however, was ditched shortly after a Korean Communications Commission study found that it only decreased malicious comments by 0.9%. Korean sites were also inundated by hackers, presumably after valuable identities. Further analysis by Carnegie Mellon’s Daegon Cho and Alessandro Acquisti, found that the policy actually increased the frequency of expletives in comments for some user demographics. While the policy reduced swearing and “anti-normative” behavior at the aggregate level by as much as 30%, individual users were not dismayed. “Light users”, who posted 1 or 2 comments, were most affected by the law, but “heavy” ones (11-16+ comments ) didn’t seem to mind.”

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Surprisingly Good Evidence That Real Name Policies Fail To Improve Comments | TechCrunch (via onthemedia)

Or, to quote Yonatan Zunger, one of the Google+ leads:

2. a) We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren’t going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.) We’re focusing right now on identifying bad behaviors themselves, rather than on using names as a proxy for behavior.

(Scroll down the page a bit.)

Real name policies are fundamentally based on simultaneously believing that:

1. People who would otherwise be jerks will be deterred by the risk of real-world consequences to them.
2. There is no risk whatsoever of harmful real-world consequences from posting under your real name.

The flaw should be obvious.