Re: Room for government DIDs?

David, it's a fascinating idea to create country-specific DID methods. My
first reaction is that this would only make sense if those countries wanted
to run country-specific blockchains or distributed ledgers. While they
could certainly choose to do that, it would seem redundant to
public blockchains that gain sufficient mass, i.e., it would be a little
bit like creating country-specific networks instead of just joining
the Internet.

=Drummond

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 5:52 PM, David E. Ammouial <da@weeno.net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I recently joined the few identity-related workgroups, out of interest for
> the general subject of decentralised digital identity. I like the idea of
> DIDs a lot because I find it refreshingly realistic to acknowledge the
> existence of multiple identity "worlds" rather than trying to create one
> meant to be the only one. I'm using the world "refreshingly" because it
> really brings back the original spirit of an internet that is diverse at
> all levels.
>
> Back to the subject of this email. Governments' attempted monopoly of the
> concept of people's identity is something I personally dislike. You are not
> defined by what a government accepts or says about you, but by what you say
> and accept about yourself, and maybe by what the people you care about say
> and accept about you. However, in some situations those "people you care
> about" do include governmental entities, for practical definitions of
> "caring". :)
>
> To give a concrete example, you might want to allow your "legal self" to
> act upon your Sovrin/uPort/V1/X identity through an institution or a
> company. For example if a government entity provides a facial recognition
> API to authenticate people, that would correspond in practice to a service
> of a "did:gov" method. Proving that you are who you say you are (in legal
> terms) can be something desirable.
>
> What would be the practical steps of introducing a "did:gov" method? I'm
> thinking of a schema like:
>
>     did:gov:XX:xxxxxxx
>
> Such an identity would be issued by the government of country XX (e.g. US,
> FR, PE, etc.). The last bit would depend on the rules of each particular
> country. For example Peru has different types of identity documents: DNI
> (documento nacional de identidad) for nationals, CE (carné de extranjería)
> for residents that are not nationals, and a few others. In that context,
> Peru would perhaps define DIDs around the lines of
> "did:gov:pe:dni:1234345", but that would obviously be up to the Peruvian
> government to define those rules.
>
> What do you think? There are probably technical aspects, legal aspects,
> practical aspects... I apologise if this topic has already be brought up in
> the past and I didn't read about it before posting. I did some basic
> research on the list's archive and couldn't find anything.
>
> --
> David
>
>
>