[shotgun]

The trouble is who has both ownership over and is able to exercise control over your identity data? I do like your idea of using licensing as a possible mechanism.

It's one thing to say the government will host the ID data for free, for every American. (Or at least every American they deem worthy of a proof-of-online-identity certificate.)

But possession is often viewed as 9/10ths of the law. Calling it "my" data is misleading if they really mean "data about me."

Would I like to have a permanent, personal and authenticated key value store to in conjunction in some interpersonal or person-machine transactions? Absolutely.

But I don't see how having a government issued identity solves the problem of how my browsing data might be misused elsewhere.

It would seem that it only adds more personally-identifiable metadata that could be intercepted, tracked, or stolen along the way.

How would such an ID system enable the creation and enforcement of a do-not-track list? That sounds appealing, but how does my identity being tracked stop me from being tracked?