Eric is applying what we should start calling Norlin’s Law (although Norlin’s Lawlin is more euphonious) — “The Net moves everything toward the public domain” — to the question of identity. While I’ve been arguing (if whining counts) that anonymity should stay the default on the Internet, Norlin thinks he’s got me in a logical cleft stick from which there is no escape: the Net moves identity towards the public domain, too. To support this he points out that as I post stuff about, say, “how crazy the RIAA is” (hey, Eric, I’m not letting them plead insanity!), I’m “simultaneously losing the very thing he thinks the net provides him with — anonymity.” His “bottom line” is: “You can’t have it both ways.”

Oh yeah?

Since Eric and I and every sane person of stout heart believes that individuals ought to control their own IDs, the “it” I can’t have both ways can’t be being able to be anonymous and identified. I can have both of those by sometimes identifying myself and sometimes not.

It’s a question of defaults. I want anonymity to be not only under my control but also to be the normal, usual, default behavior. That doesn’t mean that I always and only want anonymity. My anxiety about the large-scale digital ID systems now under construction is that they’ll flip the default because it’s in the interest of vendors and governments to have me narrowly identified. They’ll apply market and legal pressure to make anonymity look like a choice only for crooks and cowards.

If we’re talking about defaults, I can have my cake and eat it, too…and either publicly identify myself as a cake-eater or not.

Categories: Uncategorized dw