Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C

Because expecting standardization of DID methods at this point is unreasonable. A premature attempt to standardize DID methods would be both futile and likely harmful.

It's futile because the future universe of DID methods can't be anticipated now, so whatever wrong set of DID methods W3 promulgated would include both poor choices and omit good choices. It's harmful because whatever future methods might emerge will relegated to a second class for having failed to 'get in' on the initial standard.

Better to avoid prematurely enshrining some arbitrary set of methods and allow a consensus to emerge via practice and exposure. At some point, as the inevitable shake-out of bad ideas and nefarious actors occurs, DID methods can be standardized in a useful way. Yes, the lack of a simple list of SHALLs will impede the immediate adoption of DID for all conceivable purposes, but better that struggle than the next to impossible task of loosening the grip of beneficial parties that have a standards document to wave around.

It's almost like they've learned something over the last quarter century.

I mean.. as I understand it, you read specs to understand something and as I kept reading it, I have absolutely zero idea what it is or even supposed to be. What is a problem it is trying to solve? I dislike it, because I immediately assume it cannot be good for me.

I found it all pretty simple after looking at it briefly when I first learned about it.

A DID URI is a URI with a 'method' and globally unique part: did:method:somegloballyuniqueid.

The "did" part is literal; a standardized URI namespace. The method part is some symbol that specifies how the unique id resolves and its representation (JSON, whatever.) The method part is what this story is about; W3C has declined to enshrine a set of methods in the standard.

Instead, W3C is delegating to a registry of methods. This registry has already grown to a sizeable number.

The idea is that you will apply a DID URI using its method and obtain a DID 'document'. This document has claims, credentials, etc. The DID owner can cryptographically prove the document represents them and relying parties can cryptographical verify claims in the document.

The actual workflow is more involved than described here but that's the gist of it.

BTW, your list of identity schemes you've had experience with roughly correspond to 'method's, although they aren't 'distributed' in the DID sense.

(Disclaimer - I work in this space, but these words are my own).

My understanding is DIDs are a unique identifier. There's a few methods that can be used regarding the construction of the identifier. It could be a unique key (did:key- https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-method-key/). It could be using web infrastructure (did:web - https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-method-web/). It could be using blockchain infrastructure (did:ion).

Whatever it is, it becomes an identifier used to receive credentials and send messages to. For example, your digital wallet can have a DID which can be used to store credentials. Your digital wallet can have many DIDs which can be useful to avoid correlation of identities.

The credentials (and the identities they represent) themselves are normally bundled into things like Verifiable Credentials (https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/) which have to be issued to something - like a DID.