: I am the author of the “Chrome Web Store is a mess” article linked above.
Actually, I do think that anonymous extension developers are a benefit. It’s like with any expression of opinion online: if you demand identity verification, you will exclude a large segment of the human diversity. All while plenty of bad actors don’t mind acting under their real name.
There are plenty of shady actors in Chrome Web Store which don’t care to hide their identity. My blog post mentions Karma and Colibri Hero, the other post from yesterday is about Urban VPN among others. They are well known, and there are policies which could be applied to deal with them.
Similarly, I don’t think that raising the developer fee will do any good. Companies like BroCode or ZingFront will have no problem paying a higher fee, just like they won’t have trouble finding people to provide identities for their accounts. They earn enough money to be able to afford that. At the same time, this will considerably raise the bar for hobby programmers, which is too high already.
I really don’t think that we want to push Chrome Web Store further towards a collection of corporate spam and malware.
You know, this is a solvable problem. It requires these modified extensions to be removed sooner than they earn enough money to pay for the modification effort, not years after upload. But it requires committing resources to moderation.
regards
Wladimir Palant