Coding Horror: Your Internet Driver's License

I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driving).

That is what your mother thinks of when she hears Driver's License. Why on earth would that be the branding you pick for OpenID or federated authentication? You are practically trolling your own idea at that point!

Observe the kinds of things people are going to say about any federated identity scheme which you call a License:

"Jeff Atwood thinks the government should be able to take away your Facebook account! He's fascist!" "I didn't say that!"

"Jeff Atwood thinks your mom shouldn't be allowed on the Internet until she stops calling it 'the Googles'! He's an elitist bastard!" "I didn't say that!"

"Jeff Atwood thinks that if you get kicked off a WoW server you should lose your Gmail account. He's in bed with corporate interests!" "I didn't say that!"

I don't like the idea of having one identifier which can be used to tie together all information about me - because linked data provides an unwarranted amount of power to people who have access to it.

I think 'an internet drivers license' would basically become an ID card.

Your email address probably already links all of your online accounts.

Unlike an ID card you can have as many OpenID accounts as you wish – they can be freely created just as easily as email addresses. The solution is the same as for email: Give a different account to each site.

I was hoping this article would touch on the issues raised in the "Open ID is a nightmare" article - http://blog.wekeroad.com/thoughts/open-id-is-a-party-that-ha... - rather than restating the conceptual basis for using Open ID authentication systems

I'm not sure he's talking about a separate "Internet ID" that should exist. I think he's talking about websites adopting OpenID and/or OAuth as authentication methods, with a smaller number of trusted entities as authorities (Facebook, Twitter, Google, MyOpenID, Verisign, etc).

I'm not sure where people are getting this idea that he's talking about creating a new concept called an Internet Driver's License. He's just trying to encourage service providers to adopt OpenID/OAuth instead of traditional logins.