It is difficult to guess whether the national security and counter terrorism and contra paedophile brigades will, even when combined, push through a demand for electronic identity more than the anti-hacker and anti-spam and DRM must be personal brigades.  No, this is not one of those nice after dinner talking points, but a close analysis of the must have an identity brigades and their stances.

In our own little backwater of the United Kingdom we have seen the government move through regulations that mean you cannot open a bank or savings account, or buy property or trade in shares, without producing photo-id.  Never mind who that disenfranchises.  You know it is for your own good because it could only ever be a problem if you had something to hide!

That might not be so bad except they also intend to use it to enable them to dig into every aspect of every electronic transaction you ever carry out, and once cheques and cash have been removed that should just about cover it.  After all, no-one could ever steal your electronic identity - could they?

But bigger battles are being fought in the US and the Far East.

In the US there are some interesting conflicts (and I am not talking about Iraq/Afghanistan here), with the national security boys wanting to be able to monitor anything wherever, whenever and however they choose, the counter-terrorism (not quite the same slice) people wanting to make sure they can identify who everyone is at a physical level, and the contra paedophile groups wanting to be able to identify everyone who has ever gone near a porn site because they must be inherently evil.  Their ideas of identification vary significantly, because their end objectives of using the information also vary.  

The US and the Far East also have some interests in common, perhaps because the Far East is now a major investor in the entertainments sector – films, music, computer games and hardware – the DRM brigade.  In some circumstances (downloading from file sharing or similar) they wish to be able to identify who is at both ends of the equation, but mainly they want to be able to enforce a series of use rules for electronic information, and they really really really do not want to know who is the user unless that is the only way to run the system because it causes lots of other problems.

But the war is being fought by global commerce and industry.  They are sick to the back teeth with the cost and damage caused by spam, hacking, information theft, so-called social networking systems and other employee time-wasting activities that it seems impossible to prevent.  That is where real money is lost that makes the cries of all the other players unimportant.

And the people that deserve a bit of help here are commerce and industry – globally.  Because there is no angle for gain by any one country over all the others.  After all, security mechanisms fail at the weakest link, don't they.  So we are either all in this together, or we have nothing at all.

But since global commerce and industry do not have a voice, whilst all the other players do, we are going to continue seeing the lobby industries maintain their conflicting momentum whilst successfully draining time, energy and money from the people actually trying to do business.  Of course they will say that their agenda is valid and will solve everyone’s problems, but then they would, wouldn't they.

Meantime I think we will stick to our guns.  Simple DRM systems that do not try to identify the actual individual who is licensed, but stop whoever they are from readily giving away what they have bought.  It may not solve the world's problems, but it solves a defined problem, which is a lot better than doing nothing.  

Oh, and it avoids all the stuff about personal data, monitoring and so on, that gets some regulators really excited.