Just about every small, medium and large company in the developed world is hugely dependent on the internet: communications, supply chain, design, marketing, finance, sales, support, and other critical business activities are using the internet to increase efficiency, scale, and economic growth. Consumers, citizens, communities and families are now relying on the network to better communicate, learn, share knowledge, and increase mobility. The reliance on the network means that outages and virus outbreaks are simply no longer acceptable. Phishing and pharming among other network criminal activities are responsible for companies and consumers losing billions of dollars.Figures don't include lost opportunities due to consumers' and suppliers' wariness of internet-based transactions. Authentication is one of the biggest pushes by online watchdogs. In a recent conversation with Paul Mockapetris who co-wrote DNS, we discussed how DNSSEC can better guarantee that the information retrieved from a web site actually came from the intended web site and not from an imposter. A user can eliminate spam by opting to receive e-mail only from people who have authenticated their identity. To put it simply: strong authentication means trust, trust means more transactions.
Why does it matter to carriers and their partners?
According to the Liberty Alliance Project there will be 1 billion Liberty-enabled devices and
identities by the end of 2006, specifically:
- 120 million citizen identities in the e-government sector
- 585 million identities and devices in the mobile and telecommunications
sector - 72 million online service provider users able to leverage Liberty identity
specifications - 20 million Liberty-enabled identities in the technology and business sectors
with organizations managing a variety of B2B and B2C services
Communication service providers manage more identities than anybody else on the network. The advent of converged networks is making the distinction between network subscriber (who pays the DSL bill?) and network users (who downloads what?) more important from a security, personalization, and reporting standpoint. While transforming their networks to support triple or quadruple play, carriers need to work with partners to develop circles of trust that will increase participation and transactions. At CTIA last week, Lucent and Sun showed a prototype demonstrating their collaboration to simplify subscribers' access to wireline and wireless services whether they are based on web, mobile telephony, IPTV or IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architectures. Over the next months, I will discuss other solutions and how Sun is helping carriers simplify identity management, improve subscribers' experience, and monetize their networks.
Why is participation important?
Why is music download on phone handsets measured in billions of dollars (compared to the paltry music download business on PCs, even with iTunes)? Because phones are authenticated (with a Java SIM card), content and network providers can ensure legitimate use of media content. Earlier this month, Movielink and CinemaNow have offered consumers the opportunity to download new movies at the same time as they were hitting the DVD shelves. The DVD industry, like the CD, floppy disk, VHS, and LP industries before, is poised to disappear sooner or later. The participation on the network is changing the way digital content is created, managed, distributed, and consumed. The result is more revenue for content creators as authentication and convenience fuel commerce. In turn, the success of music download on the wireless network can happen on all networks for all types of multimedia content.
Network identity should not be under the control of only one company (a la Passport) or even one single industry (banks and governments have a role to play in federating network users
identities).
To finish on a humoristic yet important note, here's a clip describing what identity should not be.
