Re: Utah State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) legislation

On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 5:01 PM Joe Andrieu <joe@legreq.com> wrote:
> What's happening in the EU is the opposite of open innovation and
> I expect it will need to be reengineered within the decade.

Yes, exactly.

For those of you that haven't read Joe's response, it is excellent and
conveys much of my disappointment in the EUDI work. It's a mistake to
say that SEDI is more similar to EUDI than not.

I'm deeply concerned that EUDI has been captured by centralized
government and big tech interests. The real decisions seem to be made
behind closed doors masquerading as open forums. Legislators have been
tricked into thinking they're building something that is going to
protect their citizens when the most likely outcome are multiple
walled gardens that serve government and big tech interests more than
they serve the citizens.

Our (Digital Bazaar's) experience is not academic in this regard.
Remember that we actively build digital credential systems for some of
the largest governments in the world as well as large swaths of
private industry (retail, banking, etc.). We have direct experience
with being asked to align with EUDI by government agencies, and those
requests have gone something like this:

1. In order to protect our reputation, we need to support centralized,
government controlled trust lists like EUDI is planning to do for
issuers.
2. In order to protect our citizens, we need to protect people from
sharing data with the wrong verifiers, so we need to have all
verifiers register with the big wallet vendors and only support OpenID
HAIP.
3. In order to combat vendor lock-in, we need to ensure that our
citizens have an alternative to big tech wallets, so we're going to
launch a government wallet (but only allow government credentials into
that wallet).
4. In order to prevent fraud, we need a strong compliance regime for
digital wallets so we can trust the "holder binding" aspect of them;
we can't support more than the big tech wallets and the government
wallets until that is in place.

Every single one of those asks comes from a good place, but based on
what EUDI is doing, is an anti-pattern that the community has known
about for a very long time now. I can assure you that the decisions
made as a part of the EUDI program is driving multiple governments
around the world to push further into each anti-pattern... and every
SDO (through big tech participation), including W3C (via Web Payments
and DC API), is helping with some aspect of making those anti-patterns
a reality. This is not conspiratorial thinking, I can confirm that we
are regularly having these discussions with multiple governments and
vendors these days (and are doing our best to convince them that these
are anti-patterns that are going to harm citizens).

Now, compare that with SEDI, which seems to have been written by
people that were influenced by much of the hard won wisdom in this
community -- they were aware of the dangers and have written pretty
solid legislation that corrects many of the misguided language and
actions in EUDI. It's not perfect, and time will tell if the
implementations truly live up to the legislation. They'll need to
refine, but they're certainly off to a better start than where EUDI is
right now.

I do hope that EUDI gets its act together. Europe has shown the world
how it is capable of doing wonderful things -- they pushed Visa and
Mastercard back and did a great job with their payments systems and
reducing payment interchange fees. They are actively and aggressively
regulating both Google and Apple App Stores and devices and are
improving competition in Europe. These are things the US has failed to
do over the course of decades and is unlikely to succeed at in the
near term.

All that said, I think we have something new to point to, from a
legislation perspective, that exemplifies the principles that built
this community... and it's not EUDI. The response to each of the
anti-patterns above is not centralization, it's decentralization --
and that is in the best interests of governments, their citizens, and
all the people of the world that value liberty and democracy.

That's what is at the heart of SEDI, may we be so lucky to achieve the
vision therein.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Friday, 13 February 2026 14:52:45 UTC