Emerging Identity Paradigms
Serve the users - corporations and governments can fend for themselves.
Identity is the Root of Web 3.0
Identity plays a prominent role in most views of "Web 3.0". Commercial identity verification has made great strides simply to reduce fraud in online transactions, but is generally limited in scope to a particular commercial relationship. Efforts to define cryptographically verifiable identities of users and institutions are underway to meet the needs of governments, corporations, and social media protocols.
Self Sovereign Identity
The leading standards work is termed Self Sovereign Identity and explicitly recognizes the interests of government and corporations as potentially competitive to the interests of the individual or entity being identified. The controlling legal framework is the United Nations, and various European rights are also specifically recognized. Self Sovereign Identity is global in scope, requiring it to meet legal requirements that might be found in any jurisdiction.
The interests of the individual (in the identity of that individual) are balanced against government and corporate interests, primarily by requiring best efforts at privacy and control. It is explicitly recognized that privacy is challenging when distributing claims that cannot be repudiated, and that in certain cases the individual will not control the information attached to the identity.
A Self Sovereign Identity is also intended to be intrinsically attached to the individual identified, such that the two become permanently inseparable. It is explicitly assumed that immutable ledgers will house the digital identities, further exacerbating the impact of privacy breaches.
Identities in Public Square Networks
Self Sovereign Identity solves much more difficult problems than exist within explicitly public speech in the US. Immutability and the tight binding between an individual and an identity are not needed because American free speech extends to psuedonymous publishing. Third party controls on publishing are not needed because competing interests are weighed after content is published, rather than before.
Pseudonymous Publishing
American law protects anonymous or pseudonymous speech as well as speech that is specifically claimed in the legal name of the publisher. The Federalist Papers were published by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the pseudonym "Publius" in 1787 and 1788. These articles and essays laid out arguments in favor of the Constitution of The United States, and are still referenced today.
In 1995, the Supreme Court recognized anonymity and pseudonymity as "not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent" and "a shield from the tyranny of the majority". Support for pseudonyms is consistent with US law. (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334)
Prior Restraint
More generally, US government prior restraint is not legally permitted, and corporate interests in the speech of individuals is generally handled after the fact. Even the mundane instance of copyright violation requires takedowns after publishing, rather than before.
Provenance, not Privacy
The primary role of identity in public speech is to establish the provenance of published material. This use case puts privacy explicitly out of scope.
Public Identities
The identity needs associated with public statements made under US law can be met with a simple identity scheme in which the identities can be created and hosted by the individual with no third party intervention, are fully available for public review at will, and are not required to correlate to a real person.
Third party verification of material elements like residential address can be included within the public identity and verified by any reader.
Existing W3C standards can meet these requirements. DID:WEB resolution to URL and Verifiable Claims for optional 3rd party validation provide the basis.