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

On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 6:53 AM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>

I've been warning about this for some time, see:

    * https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/musings-gdc25/
(TLDR: platform capture at global identity standards)
    * https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/ssi-bankruptcy/ (TLDR: how
SSI's own community lost the plot)
    * https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/eidas/ (TLDR: good
intentions, bad architecture)
    * https://www.blockchaincommons.com/articles/echoes-history/

Manu, your four anti-patterns from direct experience with governments are
devastating — and they seem to be exactly what SEDI was written to prevent.
I've done an initial analysis of SB275, and plan to go through it
line-by-line.

    * https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/Musings-SEDI/ (TLDR: what
Utah got right)

Two things struck me that haven't received enough attention yet.

First, the bill of rights. The very first entry declares that identity is
"innate to the individual's existence and independent of the state." I've
been doing this work for a decade, and seeing a state legislature
independently arrive at something so close to the Existence principle from
my original SSI work — that was a moment. It means the ideas are spreading
beyond our community, which was always the point.

Second, the Duty of Loyalty. SB275 requires wallet providers, verifiers,
and relying parties to act in the "best interests of an individual." That's
agency law applied to digital identity — the holder is the principal,
everyone else works for them. Compare that to EUDI's architecture, where
the wallet vendors and governments end up serving their own interests first.

But here's what worries me. The Duty of Loyalty appears to be a statutory
minimum — not something a user can sign away in a clickwrap. That's
powerful. It's also a target. Every one of Manu's four anti-patterns
represents an interest that would love to carve out an exemption. We need
to watch for platform lobbyists asking Utah for "reasonable" exceptions
that hollow out these protections. Regulatory capture is how good
legislation dies — not through repeal, but through amendment.

I also agree with Joe's framing that you trust the math, not the client.
SEDI's "personal digital identifier" — created by the individual,
mathematically provable, transportable to infrastructure of their choosing
— embeds that principle in law. EUDI has nothing comparable.

For those interested in how other jurisdictions compare, I wrote about what
Switzerland's e-ID needs to get right:

    * https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/musings-swiss-eid/ (TLDR:
better than the EU, but not good enough)

SEDI is the best legislative expression of our community's principles I've
seen. Let's make sure it stays that way.

— Christopher Allen