From something I read on Seattle Pi.  Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer (CRSO?) recently attended the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where he proposed a sort of “Internet Driver’s License” idea.  While I’m in favor of people voluntarily giving up their anonymity online in order to build their reputations in the increasingly integrated digital dimension, the idea of a means to track and potentially prevent people from having access to the internet is in poor taste.

The example given in the article is that, IRL (in real life), you can walk down the street without having to identify yourself, but you can’t just walk into the bank vault.  Just as with a driver’s license, you prove a very, very basic grasp of the rules and are licensed, but break the rules of the road sufficiently and you can be prohibited from driving.

Now, those who support such an idea point out that something like this could be a good way to protect online customers from fraud and such, but as much as I’m in favor of stringing up scammers by their ankles and slowly sawing them in half vertically, I know that, just as it is with gun regulation, the rules are only followed by the law abiding citizens.

To impose new rules is to create new organizations to enforce them.  Now we’re talking about trying to shoehorn the inherent freedom of the web into the archaic, top-down mindset of control.  Smells like the old guard, still afraid that their participation in the generally unmoderated global conversation online will reveal them as the unqualified strokes that they really are.

Rather than corporate hotshots presenting such ideas to committees of other big shots at illustrious conventions in Europe, people who believe in such things should be out in the trenches, discussing the idea with the masses online at the grassroots level.  To do anything else strongly suggests another attempt to reign in freedom.

Information is power.  In the past, the wealthy and well-connected were able to hoarde information and mete it out a bit at a time as it stood to benefit them.  Today, the internet has us all sharing petabytes of information freely.  Now the people have the power to unite and shine a spotlight on the self-serving and unqualified.  The old guard doesn’t like that at all and will continue to look for ways to gain a foothold of control online.

You aren’t your screen name.  You aren’t your number of friends.  You aren’t your followers or post count.  You’re a real person.  Be yourself online. If “broncosfan41″ says something online, these corporate types can dismiss it, but if “John Smith of Denver, Colorado” says it, they have to think twice.  Real names mean real words.  We don’t need mandated personal identification on the internet.  We should be freaking proud of who we are and how we present ourselves online on our own.

We can stay anonymous and let the CEOs and politicians impose rules for us online.  We can let the internet degrade into a giant, corporate shill where everyone thinks in terms of what a bunch of random screen names can or can’t do, but wouldn’t it be a better idea if we encouraged more people to think in terms of should or could?

In the glovebox:

• What Fuels Passion?
• TWICs, XIII
• The Perfect Home