Should We Accept Digital ID Just to Use the Internet? No! By James Reed
The proposition that access to the internet should be contingent upon adopting a mandatory Digital ID ought to be resisted on principled, practical, and historical grounds. The cost of such convenience is not merely administrative — it strikes at the architecture of a free society.
First, anonymity is not a fringe luxury; it is a structural safeguard. The ability to speak, read, and explore ideas without attaching one's civil identity has long underpinned intellectual dissent, whistleblowing, and minority opinion. A universal Digital ID system transforms the internet from a semi-open forum into a monitored corridor. Even if such a system begins with benign intentions — fraud prevention, child protection, or streamlined services — it creates the infrastructure for total traceability. Once established, that infrastructure does not remain static; it invites expansion. History offers little comfort that powers of surveillance, once granted, remain narrowly confined.
Second, the logic of Digital ID introduces a subtle but profound shift: from permissionless access to conditional participation. The internet, in its original conception, functioned as a decentralised network where entry required only connectivity, not credentialing by authority. A mandatory ID regime redefines access as something granted rather than assumed. This is not merely bureaucratic — it alters the citizen-state relationship. If access can be granted, it can be revoked. The question is not whether this will happen universally, but whether the possibility itself is acceptable.
Third, security arguments in favour of Digital ID often underestimate systemic risk. Centralising identity creates high-value targets. A breach of such a system is not analogous to a leaked password; it is a compromise of one's entire digital existence. The more comprehensive the ID, the more catastrophic its failure. Decentralised anonymity, by contrast, disperses risk. It is messy, but resilient.
Fourth, there is the cultural dimension. A society that normalises constant identification begins to internalise surveillance. Behaviour changes. Speech narrows. The informal, exploratory, and often chaotic nature of online discourse — precisely what allows new ideas to emerge — becomes sanitised. One does not need overt censorship when self-censorship becomes habitual.
Finally, there is the question of proportionality. To say "accept Digital ID or lose the internet" is to frame the issue as a trade-off between convenience and principle. But the internet is not a luxury service like a streaming platform; it is now integral to education, commerce, communication, and civic participation. Conditioning such a foundational medium on identity compliance risks excluding those who, for legitimate reasons, resist it, whether for privacy, political, or philosophical grounds.
To choose to live without the internet rather than submit to mandatory Digital ID may seem extreme, but it is a coherent form of refusal. It asserts that some thresholds, once crossed, cannot easily be reversed. The real question is not whether Digital ID offers efficiencies, it undoubtedly does, but whether those efficiencies justify the transformation of the internet from an open network into an identity-gated system.
If the price of access is total identification, then the refusal is not irrational. It is a line drawn in defence of a different vision of what the digital world ought to be.
