Five Easy Pieces of Online Identity
Every Internet service that has a concept of users has to deal with identity. And for anything social (which seems like everything these days) identity is a huge part. For the Internet as a whole, there are battles waging to “own” identity—or, at the very least, not let someone else own it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ev Williams' essay lands mid-argument rather than mid-news cycle: since at least MSNBC's 2005 'Let's see some ID' piece and the 2007 debate over securing your own data, identity has been treated as a user-side problem, while Williams reframes it as a platform-side contest — every service with users must decide whose identity layer it runs on.
He is also picking up a thread John Battelle opened six months earlier in Identity and The Independent Web, which warned that third-party logins put the independent web's user relationships at risk. The absence of any pickup or public reaction on this piece suggests it circulated as practitioner shorthand among builders rather than as mainstream coverage.
First-order effects
- Every social service building a user base in 2011 faces Williams' framing directly: adopt someone else's identity system or build its own, and the choice determines who controls the account relationship that social features depend on.
- Publishers on the independent web, per Battelle's October 2010 argument, are the immediate exposed party — outsourcing login outsources the user graph along with it.
Second-order effects
- If a small set of providers wins default-login status, they become gatekeepers for distribution across every site that embeds their buttons, converting a convenience feature into a chokepoint.
- Where real-name identity becomes the price of participation, anonymous contribution gets squeezed — the tradeoff Bruce Schneier laid out in his February 2010 piece on internet anonymity.
Third-order effects
- Authentication consolidating into a handful of vendors would turn identity into shared infrastructure, echoing the 2005-era ID debates but at platform scale rather than per-site scale.
- The unresolved tension Williams names — everyone wanting to own identity so no one else does — points toward a market structured by a few credential holders, with the open web's pseudonymous culture as the casualty if the pattern holds.
The trend: Online identity is migrating from per-site accounts toward platform-owned login layers, forcing a contest between sign-in convenience and the independent web's control of its own user relationships.