South Korean Court Declares Online Real Name Law Unconstitutional

As people spend more and more time online, and can do more things online, incumbents, be them out of touch corporations or governments, are panicking realizing that they're losing some of the control they've gotten so fond of.

Their response is to try to regulate the web and impose rules and laws made for the "real" world to the web.

It never works, but that's not stopping anyone from trying. South Korea figured out long ago that people online needed to be held better accountable.

What better way to do that than to require them to use their real names for everything. It's one thing when Facebook or Google do it as a policy for their sites, it's another when it's the actual law.

Thankfully, it didn't come to pass, a court declared the law unconstitutional. The law has been around for a while though, five years, and it required people to use their real names for some 150 popular websites.