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

Car analogy

[Jason Levine]

I think this would be best explained with a car analogy.... wait, doesn't "Internet Driver's License" have a built-in car analogy?

Re:we need a law?

[ehrichweiss]

Actually he's come up with an idea that's about 6 years behind my own thoughts, including the drivers license analogy. The deal is that while there might not be any deaths from not knowing how to use your computer and/or the internet, there are the tons of idiots who click on every fucking email they get, they join every "OMG, Obama is gonna ban kittenz!!!" or "get your Dislike Button here by spamming your friends for us" group on Facebook(that inevitably is revealed to be created by spammers or malware writers), download software they should know better than to even look at...AND THEN after their computer becomes infected it comes delivering spam on all the innocent networks, including my own. There's no need to ban people "arbitrarily" because right now there's plenty of evidence to prove that most of the people using the internet right now have no clue how badly they're fucking up the experience for the rest of us and there's nothing wrong with the idea of requiring people to prove they have some idea as to what they're doing when online because of this. It doesn't have to be revoked for arbitrary reasons either, we can settle for something as simple as banning people for allowing their machines to become spambots for more than a day and their license could be restored the moment they proved their system was clear of malware via an online scan ala Trendmicro or the like. And there's an economic factor that goes far beyond spam: tech support. I used to run a tech support company for a cable internet operation and I cannot begin to count the number of times that the user expected us to deal with THEIR virus problems with a "you mean *I* have to pay to have this fixed?!?!? I have an internet connection that I'm paying for and can't use and YOU are supposed to help me get online", or they wanted us to setup their wireless router, or gobs of other issues that could be cured if they'd take a goddamn weekend workshop on responsible computer and internet usage, for example "the point of demarcation for an ISP is the CPE(customer premise equipment) modem, not their router, not their firewall." Even crazier is that Craig Mundie HAS to know that 99.9999% of the users infected with malware are Windows users so it's not like he's saying that those of us who use Linux, BSD, OS/X, etc. are at fault as some of us might come to expect from a Microsoft employee.