[flangola7]

> I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly

How much front line experience do you have fighting organized false engagement campaigns, fraud, and other botting? Sprawling amounts of activity you see online is not genuine. I would not be surprised if 50% or more of the comments on Reddit and HN are not by sincere users given their complete lack of identity verification.

Businesses offer discounts through ID.me because they know it comes from a real buyer and doesn't have the 1-10% chance of being a fraud bot. Running your own email server and assuring your emails actually make to a user's inbox is nigh impossible, for a reason. More and more of the internet disappears behind the Cloudflare wall, for a reason.

Public facing services are under a relentless assault by organized, meticulous, and resourceful actors. That was before advanced AI that can read images better than some humans and large language models that destroyed the Turing test. SOTA abilities are fortunately expensive to build and run and kept close to the chest by OpenAI, Microsoft, and others, but that defensive wall will one day fall and the internet will need infrastructure and systems in place ready for it.