I can sympathize with discontent about this, but almost nobody has brought up the positive uses of unique Internet ID.
Suppose you want a system where you want to signal to all internet companies that you don't want your browsing data to be harbored without your consent. The ID system would allow the creation and enforcement of such system.
The support for this comes in part because of pressure from the groups who are concerned about privacy and fretting over how their browsing data is used. While infringement of privacy hampers the growth of ecommerce, complete ban on harboring data hurts e-businesses (they won't be able to advertise efficiently). The solution to it is to create a free market: assign everyone a unique id, to which your preferences about harboring date will be assigned. Even better, data associated with that id can be considered proprietary, and users can license it to companies who are willing to pay for it and users can sue companies that infringe on this proprietary data bc courts will recognize it as solely yours. This is a good start if government wants to step in to protect your privacy from the "evil" corporations, while not hindering the growth of e-businesses.
Ideally, you will be protected from corporations who are after your private data. Government, however, will surely continue using it the way you don't want.
The trouble is who has both ownership over and is able to exercise control over your identity data? I do like your idea of using licensing as a possible mechanism.
It's one thing to say the government will host the ID data for free, for every American. (Or at least every American they deem worthy of a proof-of-online-identity certificate.)
But possession is often viewed as 9/10ths of the law. Calling it "my" data is misleading if they really mean "data about me."
Would I like to have a permanent, personal and authenticated key value store to in conjunction in some interpersonal or person-machine transactions? Absolutely.
But I don't see how having a government issued identity solves the problem of how my browsing data might be misused elsewhere.
It would seem that it only adds more personally-identifiable metadata that could be intercepted, tracked, or stolen along the way.
How would such an ID system enable the creation and enforcement of a do-not-track list? That sounds appealing, but how does my identity being tracked stop me from being tracked?
Suppose you want a system where you want to signal to all internet companies that you don't want your browsing data to be harbored without your consent. The ID system would allow the creation and enforcement of such system.
The support for this comes in part because of pressure from the groups who are concerned about privacy and fretting over how their browsing data is used. While infringement of privacy hampers the growth of ecommerce, complete ban on harboring data hurts e-businesses (they won't be able to advertise efficiently). The solution to it is to create a free market: assign everyone a unique id, to which your preferences about harboring date will be assigned. Even better, data associated with that id can be considered proprietary, and users can license it to companies who are willing to pay for it and users can sue companies that infringe on this proprietary data bc courts will recognize it as solely yours. This is a good start if government wants to step in to protect your privacy from the "evil" corporations, while not hindering the growth of e-businesses.
Ideally, you will be protected from corporations who are after your private data. Government, however, will surely continue using it the way you don't want.