US government begins testing national online ID system in Michigan and Pennsylvania
US Government Begins Rollout Of Its 'Driver's License For The Internet' — An idea the government has been kicking around since 2011 is finally making its debut. Calling this move ill-timed would be the most gracious way of putting it.
Context & Ripple Effects
The pilot is the payoff of a debate that opened in January 2011, when the Obama administration's answer to online identity was explicitly not a government-run national ID but a market where Silicon Valley firms would issue trusted credentials. Three years on, the government is running the tests itself, starting with residents of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Techdirt's framing — an idea kicked around since 2011 arriving 'ill-timed' — captures the skepticism, yet the story traveled unusually far for a policy pilot: GCN, SlashGear, VentureBeat and others all picked it up within a day, signaling that how Americans authenticate themselves online had moved from white paper to live experiment.
First-order effects
- Michigan and Pennsylvania residents become the first users asked to adopt federally brokered online credentials in place of site-by-site passwords, making their experience the de facto evidence for or against the program.
- The identity providers and vendors supplying the pilot get the first real-world deployment of the 2011 framework, converting a policy argument into operating contracts.
Second-order effects
- Other states now face a choice between joining follow-on pilots and holding out, which turns state governors' offices into the swing constituency that determines whether the system scales beyond two states.
- Privacy advocates and civil-liberties critics gain a concrete target — the 'driver's license for the internet' label itself invites surveillance framing — forcing the program to compete on transparency rather than convenience.
Third-order effects
- If the two-state pattern holds, online identity in the US consolidates around whichever public-private credential layer wins the early pilots, with the government setting standards while private issuers hold the customer relationships.
- A working national credential system would make identity proofing a gating function for government services broadly, raising the stakes for whoever controls the trust framework and inviting regulatory scrutiny of the intermediaries.
The trend: Government online-identity efforts are shifting from framework documents to live state-level pilots, with privacy backlash and vendor competition shaping whether a federated 'internet driver's license' becomes default infrastructure.