[Previous installment here.]

Timothy Grayson hits the nail on (my?) head when he says:

Your appropriately more earnest question is, I think, "Why are we splashing around in the shallows of an institutionally-framed, banal discussion about security, costs, and efficiency rather than rising to a visionary one focused on the power for d-ID to have a transformational effect on humans and society as we know it?" (My apologies for the hyperbole.)

While this is indeed a quite melodramatic version of the question I want to pose, it is what I'm interested in here (and, as far as I can tell from various recent discussions, most people in identity land are interested in). By the way, does anybody have numbers for what cost savings and efficiency gains are supposed to be if one deploys, say, Liberty?

He goes on to say that he does not see digital identity technologies per se as being able to have a true transformational impact on society, and — which may come as a surprise to those who don't know me well — I do agree. In my mind, what's needed to have a true transformational impact includes digital identity as a core component but is only one of several pieces. I.e. we need to get it right, which is the reason why I got involved into this discussion in the first place, and why I think we all need to constantly ask the Kool-Aid question. Nothing would be worse (for those who see digital identity as the end, and those like me who see it as a piece for something larger) than to believe our own press releases and vision statements too readily, to create huge expectations, and then not to be able to deliver really meaningful results. I'm asking: what results do we want to deliver, and why do those matter?

Dave Kearns, in commenting on Shelley Power's response to my Why Digital Identity Matters piece, makes the very good observation that there is a difference between "identify" and "identity". I'd like to add that many proponents of digital identity technology non-withstanding, many application scenarios indeed require just identification, without particularly the broad definition of digital identity ("all information that relates to me").

Andre Durand, of Ping Identity, narrows the discussion to "10 Reasons why InfoCard Matters" (although his list then only contains 7). He sees its benefits in better security (less Phishing, eliminates need to manage weak passworts) and higher user convenience (form-fill, SSO).

I guess I'd have to accept it if digital identity technology turned out to not take us any further than that, but I have the strong impression others are thinking much further. For somebody who does, check out this old article by Doc Searls (in particular the last part where he talks about the term "consumer" becoming obsolete.