It's genius level stupidity. I don't know if you have ever had the experience of trying to explain something to someone so deeply committed to paranoid stupidi

It's genius level stupidity. I don't know if you have ever had the experience of trying to explain something to someone so deeply committed to paranoid stupidity that they are actively resistant to new knowledge. You could try monosyllables, or even 'Quest for Fire' style grunts and grimaces, but the results will be the same. They tend to pick a few striking keywords from what you are saying (just the words, not any actual concepts), and they will run with those. Someone probably did try to explain to O'Donovan, but all he heard was "blah, blah, open source, blah, blah, blah". I suspect that O'Donovan is not the originator of the initiative that he is championing here, but that he has been made privy to some insider information about an impending EU crackdown on internet anonymity (which politicians and bureaucrats hate as a matter of course) and he hopes to make political capital by taking credit for it.