Session
Organizer 1: Karim Farhat, 🔒The Internet Governance Project
Speaker 1: Linda Jeng, Private Sector, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Jyoti Panday, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: El Khoury Eli, Private Sector, Asia-Pacific Group
Karim Farhat, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Milton Mueller, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Karim Farhat, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Roundtable
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: 90 minutes are required given the diversity of perspectives required to debate digital identity governance. There are many case studies, use-cases, and the panelists bring different subject-matter expertise that will require a collaborative roundtable discussion to facilitate active listening.
1. What are the relevant differences for policymakers between decentralized and federated identity as governance models conceived and applied across jurisdictions?
2. Does a paradigm shift in the governance and control of online identity from centralized to decentralized imply a renegotiation of data rights and allocations among users, credential issuers, and verifiers, and if so, how can it be expected to play out?
3. How are geopolitics affecting digital identity governance in the global south and what can be learned from population-scale digital identity roll-outs in Estonia, India and the United Arab Emirates.
What will participants gain from attending this session? This session will be an opportunity to discuss pressing identity-related questions and their impact on governance of digital technologies and markets from a policymaker perspective. Many countries are in the process of deploying state-led digital public infrastructures but their requirements vary in terms of most pressing societal use-cases. This session is about better understanding the future of digital identity, and better understanding to what extent will Decentralized Digital Identity be “the future of the web” as China’s Academy of Information and Communications Technology has called it. It will elaborate on public and private sector approaches to digital identity governance in a global South context. Presentations from participants will facilitate the comparison of various approaches, and help identify shared opportunities, challenges and lessons learned.
Description:
Digital identity governance is a foundational building block supporting the digital economy. Centralized bureaucracies like governments or hierarchical organizations have increased their reliance on public networks for the issuance and verification of credentials to better serve increasingly digitizing economies. The market for identity service providers evolved to meet their needs and allow them to manage their users in cyberspace. Our online credentials used to be managed by single organizational silos and later turned into federated systems of identity managed by large vertically integrated platforms or smaller credential service providers.
Federated Single Sign On (SSO) which allows a user to access different services with a single account was an innovative band-aid solution. As the scope and scale of services on the internet continue to expand, so have problems like data breaches, identity theft, and monetization of user’s data with little transparency. On the supply side of identity, storing and managing user data also increases cost and liability. Have we reached technical design limitations or institutional and governance challenges?
The current flaws in the governance of digital identity stem in part from the quality of digital identity signals (passwords, emails, date of birth, etc.) but also from the need to satisfy different requirements at public-private intersections e.g., digital money (KYC and privacy), employee on boarding (security – user access management), immigration (rights and traceability), and so on. Many countries like Estonia, India, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates have deployed population-scale digital public infrastructures to tackle those problems. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standardized a more bottom-up identity paradigm, Verified Credentials (VC) and decentralized identity (DID). This session will explore centralized and decentralized identity paradigms, drawing from case studies to inform future digital states that maximize the opportunity, interoperability, and extensibility of the internet while keeping it open and secure.
This proposal calls for a moderated debate and discussion that will bring together experts from the United Arab Emirates, India, and the United States. We seek to identify shared principles, baseline expectations for the deployment of digital identity solutions to enable a sustainable ecosystem from a cost-benefit standpoint while avoiding internet fragmentation. We will also explore public-private negotiations that states and markets will have to make if decentralized identity solutions are to scale globally. Through this workshop we hope to contribute to an institutional framework for decentralized identity that is consistent with the multistakeholder approach and with the principles of an open Internet. The workshop is organized as a 90 minute session which will include 30 minutes of presentations from select panelists and 45 minutes for debate and discussion which will be moderated. 15 minutes will be allocated for questions, answers, and contributions from the audience.
Hybrid Format: Once it is known that the proposal has been accepted by the MAG, the organizers will begin preparing the speakers by holding several online pre-meetings to facilitate engagement between online and onsite speakers. Advance preparation of this kind improves the quality of the interactions. During the workshop, apart from assigning a slot for online speakers we will ensure, they are given an opportunity to respond to discussions as well as highlight the steps being taken to address issues being raised. An open mic session follows the main session to enable the onsite and online participants from other countries to join the conversation and present their experiences, opinions, suggestions, etc., on how to move the discussion forward and identify action areas. To broaden participation, social media (Twitte, LinkedIn, and Facebook) will also be employed and online moderators will be charged with distilling the discussion using a dedicated hashtag.