When I was researching early history of Google+, I ran across mention of NSTIC, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.

Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem:

In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords.

Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person.

This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat...

That inquiry was sparked by Andy Carvin's infamous Q&A with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names

https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service...

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal itself: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112... (PDF) (p.26)

(Other Trusted Identity providers included ... Equifax: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advanci...)

The project was defunded in 2015.

Alex Howard wrote an excellent O'Reilly Radar piece, "A Manhattan Project for Online Identity"

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri...

My sense is that the entire social media push had a strong national policy agenda behind it. Which appears to have backfired somewhat.

Disclaimer: I helped organise migration off Google+, under the pseudonymous identity of a space alien cat. Dogs are so passe.