OneWebDay

I only learned today about OneWebDay, but I’m excited about it both for what it is and for what it could become. What it is: a day to celebrate the Internet and promote free and open global communication. What it could eventually become: an essential “social component” of the Internet’s basic architecture.

One of the Internet’s current key vulnerabilities is that it provides no way to make participants accountable for their actions without sacrificing their privacy or right to anonymity. If an online service or forum allows anonymous participation, then anyone can create multiple fake identities from which to send spam, stuff online ballot boxes, or engage in sock puppetry. If an online service requires participants to identify themselves, by using certified public keys or entering a credit card number for example, we have given up our privacy and right to any kind of anonymous participation. There is currently no middle ground: we get either anonymity or accountability, not both.

But a yearly social event such as OneWebDay could be developed so as to provide just such a middle ground, enabling Internet users to obtain identity-free pseudonyms that offer accountability while preserving privacy and anonymity. Besides the obvious long-term benefits to the Internet as a whole, such pseudonyms could offer individual users immediate benefits such as the ability to bypass spam filters, CAPTCHA puzzles, and restrictions on new or anonymous accounts. I wrote the following article about this idea a while ago, before learning about OneWebDay:

Pseudonym Parties: An Offline Foundation for Online Accountability (PDF), March 2007. (Alternatively: shorter draft in HTML from September 2006)

This is of course only one more among the many great reasons to gather and celebrate a yearly event such as OneWebDay. I invite comments and discussion on the idea from anyone involved in OneWebDay or who is interested in future of the Internet.