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Andrew,<div><br></div><div>You gloss over #1 as a given, but I'm not at all convinced that it is. There are at least four strong factors I've witnessed that are nudging the real world away from decentralization:</div><div><br></div><div>1) The bundling of additional personal data and added services alongside OpenID-based authentication raises the deployment and information bar for any who hope to be able to play. As the major providers gear up to offer a comparable service to Facebook Connect, I expect to see this wedge driven deeper, even if it takes the form of an "open stack" which could hypothetically be implemented by independent sites.</div><div>2) The most elegant solution to discovery is a direct, friendly button. Direct, friendly buttons don't lend themselves naturally towards very many providers. Even if text boxes were used, it's unclear what the visual cues would be, since some providers would rather use email addresses, some would rather use XRI/URL with OpenID branding, and some would rather use their own branding.</div><div>3) There is no trust framework. An RP places a lot of faith in an OP to deliver users back safe and sound, even above and beyond properly authenticated. When dealing with single major providers, there's some solace here, but when dealing with the broad unknown world, it could be a little scary for a service.</div><div>4) Interoperability, or lack thereof, is pretty random. We've seen countless demonstrations of that on this list in just the last few months.</div><div><br></div><div>Without addressing these, decentralization will face a serious upward battle. With big centralized providers, it doesn't really matter much what the protocol under the covers is anyway.</div><div><br></div><div>Take care,</div><div>Nate.</div><div><br></div><div><div><div>On 2 Jan 2009, at 02:49, Andrew Arnott wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">1. OpenID achieves the decentralization of identity providers. Kudos.</span></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>