Self-limited trust

Michael Chermside writes at kuro5hin:

...Thus, I assert that the largest problem Digital Identity is that, despite much potential for benefiting everyone, our current social structures are such that AS IMPLEMENTED it will benefit a few large players (mostly corporations or governments), to the detriment of the individual. If the social implications of these technologies are not properly addressed, then instead of eagerly awaiting the promise of Digital Identity we fear it.

This reminds me of something I noted last June in regard to Microsoft's now-shelved HailStorm:

Microsoft is in an interesting position.

There are lots of possible services and tools with real network effects: the greater number of people that use them, the more useful they are. HailStorm, for example.

It seems to be an ironic evolutionary inevitability that the entity that has the ruthlessness to become the most powerful is the one that we rightfully trust least to implement these high-network-effect services -- the services that would benefit most from the quick, widespread implementation the powerful entity could provide.

Because user trust is required for high-network-effect services to be adopted, must it be the case that all HNE services must rise from lesser powers?

If so, what an interesting dynamic: using this extremely limited view, the tendency is that nobody offering HNE services and tools remains king of the hill forever.

This obliquely calls to mind Robert Axelrod's algorithm contest with the iterated prisoner's dilemma problem. The IPD is a nicely distilled environment for examining algorithms of cooperation and competition. The contest pitted algorithms against each other. The winner, tit-for-tat, wasn't the most altruistic, nor the most ruthlessly competitive. It was amazingly simple.

discuss

April 17, 2002 05:47 AM