Obama's Solution for Online ID? Let Silicon Valley Take the Lead
To help solve the modern nightmare of trying to control your online identity and keep track your passwords, the government came to Silicon Valley Friday and said it was here to help. — But rather than propose …
Context & Ripple Effects
The administration's pitch arrives bundled with the White House's own same-day announcement of a National Program Office for Enhancing Online Trust and Privacy, and trade coverage at Gov 2.0 already frames the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace as one of the defining policy stories of 2011. The signal is deliberate: Washington wants trusted online identity built, but it does not want to be the issuer.
That division of labor matters because the password problem it targets — one fragile credential set per user, scattered across every site — is exactly the kind of infrastructure problem neither a single agency nor a single company can solve alone. By coming to Silicon Valley to ask rather than command, the administration is betting accreditation and coordination can substitute for a government-run credential.
First-order effects
- Private-sector identity providers now have an open lane to become the credential layer for American web users, with the newly created national program office coordinating standards rather than operating IDs itself.
- Federal agencies and commercial sites gain a sanctioned path to accept third-party verified logins instead of maintaining their own username-and-password stores.
Second-order effects
- Sites and services that currently force every visitor into a local account face pressure to federate, shifting the competitive battleground toward whoever accumulates the most widely trusted login.
- Privacy and accountability debates move from 'should there be online ID?' to 'who accredits and audits the private companies holding identity data' — a question the program office now has to answer publicly.
Third-order effects
- If the federated model holds, identity becomes market infrastructure: a small set of accredited private intermediaries standing between citizens and most online services, with government setting rules but never issuing the credential itself — a structurally different path than any state-run single-ID scheme.
The trend: Governments are increasingly treating digital trust as platform infrastructure to be coordinated rather than built — the US wager here is that accredited private identity providers can do what a national ID card would otherwise have to.