ary·InternetAmerica needs a digital identity strategyBy Will WilkinsonBy Will Wilkinson Will Wilkinson is Director of Government Affairs for identity vider Persona.
Before joining Persona, Will was Head of Policy at TBD (a division of Block), and has been Vice President for Policy at the Niskanen Center, a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, U.S.
Correspondent for The Economist, a columnist for The Week and a ator for "Marketplace Morning Report." He has published on a wide array of subjects in The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Bloomberg View, Forbes, Politico and many other publications.Online life is too cumbersome.Getty ImagesThe internet was built to connect machines, not people.
Its basic architecture maps servers to domain names and uses cryptographic certificates to ve websites are authentic.
Yet it lacks a built-in way to bridge the gap between our offline identities — citizen, taxpayer, patient, employee, student — and the digital systems on which we increasingly rely to conduct our economic, civic, and personal s.
Thanks to the internet’s missing identity layer, online life has become a painful, repetitive hassle of lost passwords, security code texts, and cumbersome, invasive sign-ups.
We cobble together credit records, blurry photos of driver’s licenses, awkward selfies, and security questions our childhood pets.
The experience is just awful, but it also doesn’t work — and it’s costing us. Americans lost $47 billion to identity fraud and scams in 2024 alone.
Organized criminal networks siphoned off billions in pandemic relief. Fraud in public benefits, student aid, and small lending has become endemic.
At the same time, generative AI threatens to make all these blems much worse.
The physical documents we upload to ve things ourselves are now trivial to fake, while the astonishing quality of deepfake audio and means that our own faces and voices can no longer reliably ve that it’s really us on the other end of a phone line or Zoom call.
That’s why digital identity needs to be treated as critical infrastructure, the financial system, the electrical grid, and the internet itself.
Lawmakers, regulators, and industry leaders have talked digital identity as a matter of critical infrastructure for years, but the need has never been er or more urgent.
It’s time to act and create a federal digital identity framework—not to centralize identity (Americans neither want nor need a national ID), but to standardize and govern the federated architecture of online trust.
Without it, we’ll keep layering brittle workarounds on top of an internet that was never built to handle identity and risk the security and performance of all the critical infrastructure into which the internet is increasingly tightly woven.
We know what to do The good news is that we know what to do.
Digital identity nology, built on the same encryption methods we use to verify the authenticity of your bank’s website, can go a long way toward closing the chasm between online and offline identity.
Cryptographically secured digital identity has long seemed a merely theoretical solution, but that’s rapidly changing. We’ve very recently reached a nical tipping point.
We no longer have a tooling blem. Today, at least 20 U.S.
states have moved to launch mobile driver’s licenses and state IDs (mDLs) that can be held in a digital wallet, offering a glimpse of how digital credentials can work in practice.
Un physical driver’s licenses, mDLs, which are cryptographically signed by the issuing state, can’t be faked.
They support “selective disclosure,” which makes it possible to only the information needed for a specific transaction, ving you’re old enough to buy beer without also revealing your weight and address.
It’s a rare nology that enhances security and privacy at the same time. That said, mDLs aren’t currently very useful because they’ve been limited to in-person use cases.
You can use them to ve your identity at some airport security lines or tap a point-of-sale system at a handful of venues to ve that you’re old enough to buy an adult beverage.
That’s cool and holding an mDL on your phone will swiftly become more practical and convenient as readers get integrated into more systems.
However, to be really useful, digital credentials need to be sharable online.
Right now, if you want to open a bank account, start driving for DoorDash, or sell macrame owls on Etsy, you’re required to upload a photo of your driver’s license.
This is a clumsy, invasive cess ne to all s of fraud.
But over the past few months, new nical standards for sharing and verifying mDLs online, and for requesting and receiving credentials through browsers and mobile operating systems, have finally rolled out.
So, instead of launching yet another picture of your entire driver’s license into the ether, you’ll soon be able to securely an mDL — or just the information required for the specific transaction — straight from your phone or browser wallet.
The future of digital credentials doesn’t begin and end with driver’s licenses.
The same basic nology will make it possible to issue and digital birth certificates, marriage licenses, student IDs, occupational licenses, diplomas — you name it.
If it can be issued on paper or plastic, it can be issued as a secure, cryptographically signed digital credential.
We have the nology, but it won’t automatically add up to the kind of digital identity infrastructure we need — or want.
Successfully fixing the blem will require broad coordination between the government agencies that issue our identity credentials, the organizations that set nical standards, the software companies and device manufacturers that build secure digital wallets, and citizens rightly jealous of their privacy and sensitive personal information who don’t feel pressured to their mobile driver’s license every time they order a pizza.
We could easily get stuck with a patchwork Without federal leadership, we’re ly to get stuck with what we already have: a patchwork of DMV-led identity grams, closed-system vendor contracts, and siloed solutions that don’t scale or interoperate.
To get this right, we need a federal digital identity strategy that establishes the rules, standards, and safeguards for how identity works in the 21st century.
That strategy should do four things: Establish d nical and policy standards for how digital identity credentials are issued, verified, and used.
That includes privacy-by-design, selective disclosure, cryptographic integrity, and high-assurance verification. Ensure interoperability across states, agencies, platforms, and sectors.
Whether someone’s credential is issued by a state, a federal agency, or a private entity, it should work wherever identity is needed—just passports, but for digital life. Build public trust.
That means legal guardrails, transparency, and oversight. Identity infrastructure should be open, auditable, and tected from abuse by both state and corporate actors.
There need to be rules limiting when sensitive digital credentials can be requested, and regulating how our personal information is collected, stored, and d.
The issuers of digital credentials should not know when or where you’ve presented them. If digital IDs can be used to track us, we won’t use them. mote inclusion and resilience.
Not everyone has a smartphone. Not everyone drives. Not everyone wants to use the same platform.
A national framework should support public options—such as offering identity verification and digital credential issuance at local post offices—and mandate device and platform neutrality.
The government has taken some small steps in the right direction.
The text of the GENIUS Act, which creates a legal structure around stablecoins, directs the Department of the Treasury to explore digital identity nology as a tool for combating illicit finance.
wise, a recent report from the White House Working Group on Digital Asset notes that digital identity is critical for securing cryptocurrency networks against fraud and financial crime in a privacy-preserving way.
That’s great, but in an increasingly online world, blems of identity and trust pervade nearly every service and system, not just crypto networks.
Infrastructure-level blems demand infrastructure-level solutions. That begins with a federal framework for digital identity. Again, this isn’t issuing a national ID card.
Nor is it replacing paper and plastic credentials with digital ones. There should always be physical credentials and the option to use them.
It’s creating a public trust layer — an identity architecture that enables secure, privacy-preserving, human-centered participation in the digital systems that have come to shape our s.
This won’t work without trust None of this will work if people don’t trust it. There’s a reason many Americans get nervous when they hear “digital ID.” And they’re not wrong.
Identity systems — especially ones controlled by centralized authorities or tied to prietary platforms — can become powerful tools of surveillance.
Without safeguards, they risk enabling the very abuse they’re meant to prevent. That’s why privacy isn’t an optional feature. It’s the cornerstone of any legitimate identity infrastructure.
A well-designed digital identity system doesn’t just verify that you are who you say you are.
It also tects your ability to limit what you reveal — to disclose that you’re over 18 without handing over your birthday, to ve eligibility for benefits without exposing your entire financial history.
We have the tools for this. The question is whether we’ll use them. A digital identity system without democratic governance or legal guardrails doesn’t enhance freedom — it conditions it.
It turns participation into permission. And when identity becomes a prietary duct, the terms of recognition shift from public legitimacy to private control.
We built the internet without an identity layer. We can fix that. But it will take public coordination, political will, and a commitment to openness, privacy, and the common good. So let’s get started.
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