There is something deeply backwards about a world in which you can cross a national border without handing over your identity, but may soon need to prove exactly who you are just to go online.
Walk into a country and, depending on where you are coming from, you may be waved through with little more than a passport check.
Open a website, however, and increasingly the message is becoming:
Prove who you are.
Upload your ID. Verify your age. Confirm your identity. Authenticate yourself. Hand over another piece of the digital version of your life.
Welcome to the new internet.
It is being sold as safety. As protection. As responsibility. As a way to keep children away from harmful content, stop criminals, tackle fraud and make the internet a more trustworthy place.
Those are all worthy goals.
But there is a question nobody should be allowed to dodge:
How much of your identity should you have to surrender simply to participate in public life online?
Because the internet isn't some niche entertainment platform anymore. It is where we work, learn, shop, communicate, organise, publish, protest, research, debate and increasingly access essential services.
It is infrastructure.
And we are quietly turning that infrastructure into an identity checkpoint.
The internet is becoming a border crossing
For decades, one of the defining characteristics of the internet was that you could participate without necessarily revealing your real-world identity.
You could read an article.
Browse a forum.
Ask a question.
Research a sensitive subject.
Talk to strangers.
Publish an opinion.
You might use a username. You might remain anonymous. You might reveal your identity when you wanted to.
That wasn't a bug.
For many people, anonymity is protection.
It protects whistleblowers. Victims of abuse. Political dissidents. People exploring their sexuality. People asking embarrassing medical questions. Employees speaking about their employers. Citizens criticising powerful institutions.
It also allows ordinary people to separate their public identity from every single thing they have ever searched, watched, read or said.
That separation is disappearing.
The emerging model is brutally simple:
Before you get access, prove who you are.
And once identity becomes the price of admission, anonymity stops being a normal feature of the internet and becomes a privilege.
But we're doing this in the name of safety
And this is where the debate gets difficult.
Nobody seriously believes the internet should be a lawless playground.
Children should be protected.
Fraud should be tackled.
Sexual exploitation should be aggressively pursued.
Criminal networks should not be able to hide behind technology.
The problem isn't the objective.
The problem is the assumption that the answer to every online problem is to make every ordinary person more identifiable.
That's a remarkably blunt instrument.
It's the digital equivalent of saying that because some people drive drunk, everyone should have to surrender their fingerprints before getting into a car.
Security matters.
But so does proportionality.
Your identity is not just another password
The defenders of mandatory digital identification often talk about ID verification as though it were a harmless administrative step.
It isn't.
A password can be changed.
A credit card can be cancelled.
Your identity cannot.
Once an organisation knows who you are, that information can potentially be linked to what you do.
What you read.
What you watch.
Where you go.
What you buy.
Who you communicate with.
What you believe.
What you search for.
Maybe that information is never misused.
Maybe it is securely stored forever.
Maybe every organisation involved is perfectly competent.
Maybe nobody ever gets hacked.
Maybe no future government decides that information should be used for a different purpose.
Maybe.
History is not particularly reassuring about the word "maybe".
The dangerous part isn't today's policy
The most important question isn't necessarily what a digital ID system does today.
It's what it makes possible tomorrow.
Infrastructure has a habit of expanding.
A system created to verify someone's age can eventually become a system used to verify someone's identity.
A system designed for pornography can be extended to social media.
A system introduced to protect children can become a prerequisite for accessing other categories of content.
A database created for one purpose can become extraordinarily attractive to institutions with entirely different purposes.
The phrase "mission creep" sounds boring.
Until it happens to you.
And then there's the chilling effect
Imagine knowing that your identity is attached to everything you read.
Would you research certain subjects?
Would you visit controversial websites?
Would you read political material you disagree with?
Would you ask a question about mental health, sexuality, religion or addiction?
Would you participate in a protest movement?
Would you criticise your employer?
Would you publish an unpopular opinion?
Perhaps you would.
But perhaps you'd hesitate.
And that hesitation matters.
Freedom doesn't disappear only when someone kicks down your door.
Sometimes it disappears because people become afraid to open it.
We should be building privacy-preserving systems, not identity traps
There is a huge difference between proving something about yourself and handing over your entire identity.
You should be able to prove that you are over 18 without necessarily revealing your name, address, date of birth, passport number and entire digital identity.
You should be able to establish eligibility without creating a permanent record of everywhere you used that eligibility.
Technology can do this.
Privacy-preserving credentials, cryptographic proofs and other forms of selective verification offer a fundamentally different model.
The choice isn't simply:
No regulation or everyone shows their ID.
That's a false choice.
We can protect children without building a universal identity checkpoint.
We can fight fraud without making anonymity impossible.
We can enforce the law without turning every citizen into a pre-emptively identifiable suspect.
We can make the internet safer without making it less free.
The irony is almost impossible to miss
You can walk into a country as a stranger.
You can sit in a public space without first proving your identity.
You can buy a newspaper without presenting a government credential.
You can enter a library without uploading your passport.
But increasingly, the internet—the place where much of modern public life now happens—is being redesigned around the assumption that you should identify yourself before participating.
Think about how strange that is.
The physical world has spent centuries developing concepts like privacy, anonymity and freedom of expression.
The digital world is now being told to forget them.
We should be asking a much harder question
Not:
"Can digital ID make the internet safer?"
Of course it can.
Almost any surveillance system can make something safer.
The harder question is:
"What kind of internet are we willing to build in exchange for that safety?"
An internet where identity is the default?
An internet where anonymous speech is treated as suspicious?
An internet where access to information depends on passing an identity check?
An internet where private companies become gatekeepers to your digital identity?
An internet where governments can gradually connect the dots between who you are and what you do online?
That isn't a minor technical adjustment.
It's a fundamental redesign of the relationship between citizens, technology and the state.
And we should be arguing about it like one.
Because once the infrastructure is built, removing it will be infinitely harder than objecting to it now.
So yes, protect children.
Yes, fight criminals.
Yes, tackle fraud.
But don't sleepwalk into a world where the price of using the internet is proving who you are.
You may not need a passport to enter the country.
But if we're not careful, you might need one to enter the internet.
