Phil Libin remarks, regarding a recent White House common ID mandate for federal employees and contractors:

“Just as with the development of the Internet, the federal government is once again the main initial catalyst for new technology that’s going to change the foundations of mainstream business transactions in the near future.”

Indeed, ARPA (now DARPA) funded the early ARPANET, which led to the Internet, and DCA (now DISA), among other agencies, promoted it by buying equipment from fledgling Internet vendors.

However, let’s not forget that the federal government also promulgated GOSIP, which was a requirement that computer systems sold to the federal government had to support the ISO-OSI protocol suite, which was similar to TCP/IP but different. Different in that while TCP/IP was the result of a process of multiple implementations interacting with standardization, ISO-OSI was a product of standards committees, and lacked not only many implementations, but even more many users. GOSIP was a waste of time and money. Fortunately, the U.S. government wasn’t as serious about ISO-OSI as were many European governments and the EU; in Europe OSI held back internetworking until the rapid deployment of the Internet in the U.S. and elsewhere eventually made it clear that OSI was going nowhere.

Where the U.S. government succeeded in networking was in promoting research, development, implementation, and deployment. Where it failed was when it tried to mandate a technical choice.

Hm, I see the White House directive gives the Dept. of Commerce six months to consult with other government agencies and come up with a standard. If there’s a requirement to consult with industry or academia, I don’t see it.

I hope this comes out better than, for example, key escrow, a previous government attempt to mandate authentication methods.

-jsq