8 February, 2006 - 3:43am

Vin Crosbie wrote an excellent article last week using an analogy of the Cheronians from Star Trek on "Freedom/Registration, Control/Controlled: Identity 2.0 Eliminates Polarity". He extends the comparison to the Internet suggesting that the Cheronian's polar differences towards online anonymity, identity and privacy result in a Web 1.0 world of walled gardens or "identity silos". He recommends Identity 2.0 as the solution for escaping the cheronian madness of absolutism on the Web.

Crosbie posits:

"Web 1.0 is a world that very much still exists. It consists of walled gardens and 'identity silos'. It's a publisher-centric world where the user must explicitly provide the publishers' or marketers' choices of demographic information about himself before being allowed to use the site. Moreover, the user's identigraphic or demographic data isn't portable; he must provide such idata again and again because each site, though it might share tracking information with other sites, uses its own different registration system (an identity silo).

People like Bele have built this world of Identity 1.0, but people like Lokai have fled it or are too fearful to use it. The Lokais are given few means to authenticate their identities without losing their privacies to the Beles, yet the Bele complain that the world can't function without Lokais giving that up. Like on the planet Cheron, this Identity 1.0 absolutism dooms Web 1.0's inhabitants because its inhabitants think no solution is possible without compromise."

We agree with his suggestion that "anyone who is concerned about online anonymity, pseudonymity, registration, and tracking — or anyone who is building or operating Internet services that involve those issues or mechanisms" to watch our Identity 2.0 video to better understand the issues. And that media companies such as The New York Times, Guardian, and others that are using their own registration schemes should join the Identity 2.0 effort and switch to an Open Source method.