Craig Mundie Wants "Internet Driver's Licenses"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, called for the creation of an 'Internet Driver's License' at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying, 'If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.' Of course, there are quite a few problems with this. For starters, internet use cannot yet cause death or dismemberment like car accidents can; and this would get rid of most of the good of internet anonymity while retaining all of the bad parts, especially in terms of expanding the market for stolen identities. Even though telephone networks have long been used by scammers and spammers/telemarketers, we've never needed a 'Telephone Driver's License.'"

Comments

Schneier already covered this recently

[StreetStealth]

Bruce Schneier had a pretty good takedown of this kind of argument just the other day.

Accept that you'll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that's secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks. We can do far better at these things than we're doing, and they'll do more to improve security than trying to fix insoluble problems.

Ham radio

[KC1P]

So this is like a ham license for landlines which sort of *act* like public airwaves. It's actually not SUCH a bad idea -- it sure keeps the S/N ratio up in the ham bands. Even if the test is virtually unfailable, the overall sense of earned-privilege vs. god-given-right seems to add a few percent to the general level of maturity you get. It'll never happen though!

It's been proposed before, and it still won't work

[Adrian Lopez]

1. It would probably be illegal for the US government to require "drivers licenses" for general Internet use. The Internet is primarily a medium for the dissemination of speech, and the US government is prohibited from demanding that people obtain permission before speaking.

2. Even if done privately, requiring people to identify themselves for any and all uses of the internet is likely a bad idea.