A Digital Identity Digest
Episodes
The AI System That Never Was
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Digital Identity Digest, learn why the idea of an “AI system” is quietly breaking down under modern AI governance and deplo...
A Field Guide to Digital Identity Standards Bodies
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Digital Identity Digest, Heather Flanagan offers a practical field guide to digital identity standards, explaining how organiza...
Process, Standards, and the AI Rogue Wave: Notes from Gartner IAM
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Digital Identity Digest, Heather Flanagan reflects on Gartner IAM and what it reveals about digital identity decision-making, i...
ICYMI 2025: What You All Read the Most This Year
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Heather Flanagan looks back at the most read Digital Identity Digest posts of 2025, exploring what resonated across digital identity,...
Web Payments and Digital Identity Standards Are Converging – #TIL
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode Heather Flanagan examines how web payments and digital identity are converging at the W3C, exploring digital wallets, browser-based AP...
Two APIs Walk Into a Browser: FedCM vs. the DC API
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Digital Identity Digest, Heather Flanagan explores how two emerging browser APIs—FedCM and the Digital Credentials API—are ...
What I Wish I Knew When I Started in Identity
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, discover how today’s rapidly shifting digital identity landscape is bringing new practitioners into the field and challenging long-...
Robots, Humans, and the Edges of the Open Web
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode explores what the “open web” truly means amid shifting standards, AI automation, and evolving economic pressures. Drawing on discussi...
Digital Identity Wallet Standards, the DC API, and Politics
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Digital identity wallets are becoming a central focus in global identity conversations, driven by regulatory pressure, rapid technical evolution, and ...
The Regulator’s Dilemma
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode explores the regulator’s dilemma at the heart of digital infrastructure, where accountability, compliance, and governance reshape the s...
The Paradox of Protection
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When every digital system is labeled as critical infrastructure, do we actually make the Internet safer—or just more fragile? In this episode of The...
The Infrastructure We Forgot We Built
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When AWS went down, payments failed and digital life froze — exposing how fragile our cloud-based world really is. In this episode of Digital Identi...
Can Standards Survive Trade Wars and Sovereignty Battles?
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, standards development has been anchored in the idea that the Internet is (and should be) one global network. If we could just get everyon...
The People Problem: How Demographics Decide the Future of the Internet
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I've been having an intellectually fascinating time diving into Internet fragmentation and how it is shaped by supply chains more than protocols. Ther...
Why Tech Supply Chains, Not Protocols, Set the Limits on AI and the Internet
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I had one of those chance airplane conversations recently—the kind that sticks in your mind longer than the flight itself. My seatmate was reading a...
The End of the Global Internet
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many people reading this post grew up believing and expecting in a single, borderless Internet: a vast network of networks that let us talk, share, an...
Delegation and Consent: Who Actually Benefits?
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When not distracted by AI (which, you have to admit, is very distracting) I’ve been thinking a lot about delegation in digital identity. We have the...
Pirates, Librarians, and Standards Development
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With the right motivation, even I will write a blog post on a dare. And the dare I got was to write a post about what librarians and pirate captains h...
Who Really Pays When AI Agents Run Wild? Incentives, Identity, and the Hidden Bill
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Google recently gave us something we’ve been waiting on for years: hard numbers on how much energy an AI prompt uses. According to their report, the...
AI Permissions vs. Human Permissions: What Really Changes?
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve been talking about identity and access for people for decades (millennia if you think outside tech). Policies, role assignments, reviews, zero...
Roads, Robots, and Responsibility: Why Agentic AI Needs Identity Infrastructure
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We don’t spend much time thinking about the roads we drive on—until one cracks, collapses, or dumps us somewhere we didn’t mean to be. Identity ...
Bot or Not? Why Incentives Matter More Than Identity
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Let’s start with a confession: I love bots. Or at least, I love the idea of them. They’re efficient, tireless, and, if designed well, can be downr...
Working Group Chair Skills: Standards Work Isn’t Just for Coders
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This one’s for everyone who’s ever said, "I’m not technical enough to participate in standards development." If you’ve wondered what working g...
Agentic AI in the Open Standards Community: Standards Work or Just Hype?
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you want to follow what's happening in AI, it helps to know where the conversations are happening. That doesn't just mean the headlines and white p...
Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting Disinformation Needs Resilient Infrastructure
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Disinformation. Misinformation. Malinformation. These terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. That distinction matters when ...
What WSIS+20 Taught Me About Digital Identity and Global Governance
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I went to Geneva to understand what, if anything, people were saying regarding digital identity and standards in a governance-focused forum. My brain ...
Kill the Wallet? Rethinking the Metaphors Behind Digital Identity
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Much like "the cloud" or "the superhighway", the metaphor of a "wallet" has become convenient shorthand for a tangle of technical, policy, and usabili...
Local Flavors, Global Reach: Why Digital Identity Needs Cultural Context
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do you think of when someone says "digital identity"? Biometrics? Login credentials? A string of JSON data? Your social media account? The answer...
When Verification Calls Home: Three Views on Privacy, Risk, and Digital Credentials
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There’s been renewed attention lately on mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and the ISO/IEC specification that defines them. One of the more surprisi...
Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t) Prepare Us For
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Resilience is on my list of the top ten buzzwords of the year. Whether we’re looking at geopolitical turmoil, AI disruption, or yet another IdP outa...
Delegation in a Multi-Actor World: It’s Not Just OAuth Anymore
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Once upon a time, digital systems were built around a beautifully simple idea: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. That model worked, for ...
Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since I wrote last week about MCP and the need for a more structured standards development process, this week I feel like diving into what it means to...
The MCP Bandwagon
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
MCP is 'an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs.' If we’re moving toward a world where AIs are expected to do Al...
Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most digital systems were built around a simple model: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. If you need more than that, that's what passwor...
Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The tech is ready for decentralization. The governance is not. This is the final post in a four-part series exploring decentralization not as a buzzwo...
Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a Failure?
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if centralized dominance is just what success looks like in our current system? Today, I want to take a step back and ask: Why is it so hard to j...
The Cost of Decentralization: What Companies Need to Weigh Before They Commit
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to say you want more control over your systems. But the cost of decentralization in money, complexity, and overhead can hit hard when the ...
Engineering Meets Economics: Shifting, Not Choosing, Between Centralized and Decentralized
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if the real innovation is not centralization vs decentralization, but the ability to shift between them? It stops being about camps or philosophi...
Trailer
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to A Digital Identity Digest, an audio companion to my weekly blog. This podcast provides summaries of timely identity policy, AI, and interne...