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08 Feb 2008

Suppliers abandon the NIS and smart money heads to OpenID

Long ago, when we believed that Crosby was actually going to report, we put it to Sir James and his team that the real demand for better ID was online. That was where the action was. The market for the proposed state biometric monopoly ID System looked highly constrained. To create one you’d probably have to regulate it into existence, and it would still only work offline.

Events are indeed moving that way. Soon after the shrewdest and most ruthless suppliers like BAe and Accenture pull out of the IPS’s national ID Scheme, look where the smart money is going:

The OpenID Foundation today announced that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) have joined as its first corporate board members.

With these companies’ deep expertise in Internet and security technology, the OpenID Foundation strengthens the industry-wide effort to empower users with portable Web identities, or OpenIDs. This effort helps ensure the evolution of an open and interoperable Internet that helps people take control of how their personal information is shared on-line and aids on-line businesses to attract and retain more users by simplifying and securing the management of digital identities.

OpenID and the world envisioned by the “Cameron’s laws” camp is motoring. Three years after we passed a dumb law IPS is still trying to define what the underlying purpose of its project is, and how to trick and coerce us into taking medicine on which it’s increasingly clear we will gag.

We do hear a proper and duly authorised major announcement is imminent from that quarter. Wibbi it frankly discloses where we’ve got to, publishes the full Crosby findings, shows a degree of humility and realism about markets and consumer behaviour and takes into account the lessons learned and the pace of change in the online world. That would have to be a major change in attitude, and a major rethink.

Ranting aside, I must say it is now possible to engage with IPS in a way that it simply was not beforehand. Let us state frankly that they’ve spent years being so annoying that they were more public nuisance than public servants. However if they do a good and thorough announcement, critics should take a deep breath, temper the rhetoric, and try to engage constructively. I for one vow to do that. And they shall earn the right to be called public servants again...

• Posted by William Heath on 08/02/08 at 8:58pm
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Identity
• Comments (2)  Permalink

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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