Digital Identity

Network Effects and Digital Identity Management

You've probably heard of Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of nodes. The reason is simple: the value is the number of potential relationships, not the number of nodes. Digital identity suffers at the hands of Metcalfe's Law, because the difficulty of digital identity problems is proportional to the number of relationships.

The Internet uses a distributed, packet-switched architecture to manage the complexities arising from Metcalfe's network effects. I can't imagine a centralized architecture that would have scaled to the size of today's Internet. The only solution was to make each node smart enough so that relationships between any two hosts on the Internet could be established without any centralized coordination.

Efforts to create centralized digital identity systems fail to appreciate the lessons of the Internet's distributed architecture:

• First, the distributed architecture of the Internet makes it difficult for attackers to break the network by concentrating their efforts in one place. In contrast, in a centralized system, the benefit of learning how to scam or break the system is very high, making it worthwhile for criminals to invest heavily in discovering a means of compromising the system.

• Second, distributed systems are less prone to commercial or political abuse. I've discussed the governance problems I faced in creating centralized identity stores. The reason is simple: ...