The identity problem goes way beyond presence, and way beyond telephony even. I define identity as the trust of another node’s credentials, be they human or machine. I am who I say am. And WHY? Because I am trusted. As trust can only be established by an authority, we have a real problem on our hands.

But it’s not a problem that’s new.

Take DNS. The fact that we, as thought leaders, haven’t solved the dilemma of securing the identity of domain wielders is a shame. This is why e-mail spam is consuming a pathetic amount of bandwidth, and also why old friends like Carl Sassenrath and even Tom Keating have been forced to “privatize” their e-mail.

Comment spam on blogs would also be eradicated if we all subscribed to a common trust authority for domain-wielding credentials. And prosecuting abusers would simplified. Everybody wins, right? You would think Google would be on this concept like white on rice. (How much Goobandwidth is sucked up by spiders crawling splogs and spam comments designed to enrich page rank for such nefarious keywords as ‘pissing’, ‘ugg boots’, and ‘hillary duff naked’?)
Of course, creating a centralized authority for granting domain-wielding identity might not be easy. There IS that painful little issue of privacy. And of course, the entire industries that have sprung up to counter the abuse of software aren’t lobbying really hard for a central identity authority. Plus, you’d be hardpressed to push this through as law without some knuckleheaded buttnut Ivy League professor labeling it as some “unilateral move” designed to disenfranchise SOMEBODY.

But I digress. There is good news, however. My Strep is almost gone.