We have enough nymwars links for them to be their own linkspam, and likely our commenters have more to add too.
- Skud’s series of posts on her own Google+ suspension: I’ve been suspended from Google+, More comments on Google+ and names, Preliminary results of my survey of suspended Google+ accounts, Google is gagging user advocates, An update on my Google Plus suspension
- The Google+ Nymwars: Where Identity and Capitalism Collide:
What Google seems to want from Google+ users is their full legal names, although it will not come out and admit this. Not just that, but only full legal names which conform with Western European/North American naming standards… What this is really about, of course, is capitalism, which some people advocating for legal names will admit, in a sort of roundabout, weird argument. They say
it’s not about safety, of course, the service wants real names because then it can sell the data,
like this somehow ends the argument and the discussion can stop now. - Denise Paolucci, “Real Name” policies: They just don’t work.:
Many of the people who caused the worst problems on LiveJournal over the years had registered with some variant on their
real
name, or had theirreal
name in their profile somewhere, or were widely known under theirreal
name. - GrrlScientist, Google+ and pseudonymity: An open letter to Google:
Taken together, this demonstrates that I am not one of “those people” whom you wish to shut out of the G+ community. It is also apparent that Google is enforcing a vaguely-written policy that actually increases the risks faced by its subscribers.
- Bruce Byfield, In Defense of Internet Anonymity — Again:
Yet even if the arguments against anonymity were valid, a larger problem is that enforcing a real name policy is impossible for a very simple reason: Inventing a realistic pseudonym is trivial, because checking everybody who signs up would be too inconvenient for both users and an online service.
- Randi Zuckerberg’s Ill-Timed Statements About Anonymity Online:
It turns out that a lot deeply disagree with Zuckerberg’s sweeping condemnation of anonymity on the internet.
- The name game: is Google+ building a cathedral or a bazaar?:
Google sees Google+ very much in terms of the Cathedral model of social networks: It is ordered and controlled. Google knows who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and with whom at any point in time. It is a safe environment for businesses to communicate with their customers.
- (From an earlier linkspam) My Name Is Me: Be Yourself Online. Statements in support of pseudonymity. Share the link, and if you are well-known or respected and support the use of nicknames or pseudonyms online, consider making a statement.
- (From an earlier linkspam) Electronic Frontier Foundation: A Case for Pseudonyms:
It is not incumbent upon strict real-name policy advocates to show that policies insisting on the use of real names have an upside. It is incumbent upon them to demonstrate that these benefits outweigh some very serious drawbacks.
Lots of dedicated discussion and link tracking at googleplus.dreamwidth.org and Botgirl Questi’s collection of #plusgate articles.
Front page image credit: Masked by Harsha K R, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike.
Geek Feminism Blog 
My own theory is that Google is not going to relent on its “real names” policy.
Google’s customers are not the users of the free services. Google’s (paying!) customers are advertisers, and these customers want optimized sets of targets for their marketing. Google already tracks searches in order to better select advertising on its search pages. “Real names” make it easier for Google to look up their users in other databases, everything from land records to college alumni records, so they can deliver, say, a set of graduates of Eastern US colleges who also like F-F porn and own their own homes.
[I just discovered that carriage return in a comment “sends” the comment]
Google may end up modifying its “real names” policy to deal with the realities of how people are indexed in various parts of the globe, but I don’t think they will relent on the essential idea. If users were able to opt out of being able to be cross-referenced, there would be (from Google’s perspective) no point in having Google+ in the first place.
As I mentioned in a comment below, the name I go by among friends is not the same one that’s listed on my college alumni records, bank accounts and the like. As far as Google is concerned, the William C. $SURNAME that has these accounts is not the same person as the Cody $SURNAME who’s registered for their service… and yet if I registered as William, none of my friends would ever find me. (And of course there’s no middle name field. And I imagine putting first+space+middle in the first name field would probably sound an alarm *somewhere* at Google.)
Any system that actually does want to do that ought to have a way to actually cross-reference variations on a name.
In some of Skud’s tweets the term “wallet name” was used. What Google wants is not your legal name or the name you are known by in real life or on the internet: It wants your wallet name, the one on your credit cards.
The ultimate purpose of apps from Google is to link everything about you to your credit cards so charging you will be as easy as possible.
Ironically enough, despite the fact that they’re both abbreviations of the same name, my “wallet name” is not the one I actually use in real life. I imagine this is probably the case for a lot of people whose names follow the form “J. Quincy Public”… but who are forced to be “John Q. Public” by poorly designed forms at banks.
danah boyd, “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power.
More from Skud: Google+ names policy, explained, documenting everything that is known (outside Google) about what seems to cause suspension and what evidence Google will accept about your name. According to Skud, they very very strongly prefer government ID, they may accept a closely matching Facebook or LinkedIn account, essentially nothing else.