1 Why the Internet is missing an identity layer—and why SSI can finally provide one
“The Internet was built without an identity layer.”
—Kim Cameron, Chief Architecture of Identity, Microsoft
The Laws of Identity, May 2005[1]
What did Kim Cameron—Microsoft’s Chief Architect for Identity from 2004 until 2019—mean by that quote? What is an “identity layer?” Kim gives an answer in his groundbreaking series of essays called The Laws of Identity, published on his blog over a series of months in 2004 and 2005:
The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. This limits what we can do with it and exposes us to growing dangers. If we do nothing, we will face rapidly proliferating episodes of theft and deception that will cumulatively erode public trust in the Internet.
What Kim was saying is that when the internet was initially developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the U.S. military (sponsored by DARPA[2]), the problem it was designed to solve was how to interconnect machines to share information and resources across multiple networks. The solution—packet-based data exchange and the TCP/IP protocol—was so brilliant that it finally enabled a true “network of networks.” And the rest, as they say, is history.