You could ask the same about Apple Pay: "Is the end Goal to make Apple Pay the only payment method supported on the internet and kill credit card numbers"
Not only is there nothing to support your claim, there's no reason to believe this would be the next step if your claim was accurate. Instead, they'd just...require ID on the internet, it's not like that's not currently possible.
Verifying pictures of people's physical ID cards is much more involved than using a digital standard.
It may be a big leap to say that implementing a Digital ID standard means that an ID-locked internet is the end goal, but it is a necessary step to reach that goal.
A much bigger flaw in their reasoning is that it's unclear who "they" is. Apple? Why would they care beyond maybe locking their own services behind ID? Government? Because they don't seem to be even making a uniform push to get things implemented.
There’s lots to support his claim. You can’t use Homepods without an iCloud account, you can’t get an iCloud account without an Apple ID, and you can’t get an Apple ID without providing a phone number and email address.
The (eventual) goal is not to kill off anonymity, but to better support user control of data and thereby give more anonymity.
You should be able to prove your age to buy liquor, without disclosing any other information (including your name or birth date). That should work without the government or any other party knowing you. But we are still on the road to get there.
There are numerous other efforts for decentralized identity systems where the user 'holds' digitally signed credentials and presents them under consent. While most parties realize that reducing data release and supporting anonymity are important objectives, the different efforts (and participants) have different priorities.
Some efforts, like Smart Health Cards, do not support selective disclosure of information, instead just supporting digital medical documents as signed data. This was a scope reduction to get a system out more quickly for COVID vaccination credentials.
Mobile drivers licenses support selective disclosure, but many privacy controls are really being implemented via certification, where compatible reader devices are being limited to those who certify that they discard data after use.
There are stronger primitives like Anonymous Credentials [1] , which also make the cryptography itself unlinkable, and predicate proofs which let you present answers to questions without presenting the underlying information. However, standardizing and deploying such crypto at scale takes years.
Not only is there nothing to support your claim, there's no reason to believe this would be the next step if your claim was accurate. Instead, they'd just...require ID on the internet, it's not like that's not currently possible.