> In the end, this may come to a full democratic vote of all 431 W3C member companies—a referendum on how much decentralization really matters to the Web
In the end, it may come to a “the W3C can vote on whatever it wants, but if it can’t convince browser vendors to implement it, it doesn't really matter, its not going to be foundational to the web going forward” situation.
I am not a fan of the idea of blockchain based dids. Using centralized apis to access blockchains is kind of missing the point for me. And if your browser has to support 29 random blockchains for different did methods there is no way around it.
did:key, did:peer, did:web (maybe did:keri as well but I’m not sure I understand what the transport layer is) for me would be enough for did 1.0. Let’s get those working and we can see about adding blockchain based in a couple of decades.
That second rebuttal doesn't seem too strong: regardless of what the point of the proposal was, the concern to address was that in practice there doesn't seem to be interoperability. Consider one of the mentioned successes:
> Dozens of VC-capable mobile wallet apps are now available in the app stores—the vast majority of which support at least one type of DID.
If most of them support just one or a few types, that doesn't sound like interoperability to me - especially if they all support different types?
(I should note: I know almost nothing about DIDs, so interpret this as a question rather than an indictment.)
Although I don't think public reasoning for Google's and Apple's stances are available, the "real reasons" section sounds very conspiratorial: even if you consider the stated reasons misguided, that's no reason to assume that those who made the argument believe them.
Of course decentral identification is preferable, although not having too strong identification is a feature too. Of course giants try to get into the business of identity providers. This is a standard strategy of tech, image the business opportunities aside from providing security. It isn't conspiratorial at all, this has been going on for a while and everyone should take a close look here.
I don't want to ID against Google, Facebook and co. Doing so would mean they know exactly what services you identify for.
In the end, it may come to a “the W3C can vote on whatever it wants, but if it can’t convince browser vendors to implement it, it doesn't really matter, its not going to be foundational to the web going forward” situation.
Just like XHTML 2.