DID Working Group

DID Formal Objection FAQ

This document is an informative document that has been reviewed, published, and is maintained by the W3C Decentralized Identifier Working Group. The document IS NOT a reflection of the views of the objectors (Apple, Google, and Mozilla) to the publication of the DID Core specification. Comments regarding this FAQ are welcome and should be sent to the W3C Advisory Committee Forum, a Member-only W3C mailing list. Any member of the public is also welcome to join the discussion in the W3C Credentials Community Group, where updates on the status of the DID Core Formal Objections are provided on a regular basis.

  1. What is going on?
  2. What are the points of contention?
  3. Why does the W3C hate decentralization?
  4. What happens if the objections are upheld?
  5. Why the concern over Google, Apple, and Mozilla objecting?
  6. Did the DID Working Group follow its charter?
  7. Did the DID Core specification get wide review?
  8. Was practical interoperability achieved?
  9. Is the DID specification decentralized enough?
  10. Does the DID specification cause great environmental harm?
  11. Does the DID specification encourage ever growing divergence?
  12. How long will this take?
  13. What could be done in the future to avoid this?
  14. Who else has written about this?

What is going on?

The W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) Working Group achieved consensus to publish DID Core 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation (basically, a global Web standard). There were 40 W3C Member companies that agreed to publication of DID Core 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation and there were 3 companies that objected: Google, Apple, and Mozilla. The W3C Team stepped in to mediate a discussion that did not resolve the formal objections.

The acting W3C Director then decided to request feedback using an experimental group called the W3C Formal Objection Council, which is to be composed of the W3C CEO, the W3C Advisory Board, and the W3C Technical Architecture Group. This will be the first time the new W3C Formal Objection Council resolution process is going to be used for this sort of objection. The Decentralized Identifier Working Group is deeply frustrated by this recent turn of events, but understands that someone needs to be the first through this new process. Ultimately, the decision to overturn the objections or to uphold them will be up to the W3C Director, however, it is expected that this particular run will set precedent for how this is handled at W3C in the future.

It has been over three months since the formal objection was raised, with an expectation that the W3C Formal Objection Council will hear arguments for and against the ratification of DID Core in early 2022. The W3C Advisory Board has struggled to finalize the rules of operation for the W3C Formal Objection Council over the past several months.

That is, in a nutshell, what is going on.

What are the points of contention?

Standardizing “Usefully Decentralized Methods”

There seems to be general agreement among the objectors and DID Working Group that a good future state would be to have a handful of “usefully decentralized methods” that are standardized and broadly adopted. The challenge is that there is no concrete proposal among the objectors or the DID Working Group that would achieve standardizing a set of “usefully decentralized DID Methods” in the near term, because there is no agreement on what “usefully decentralized” means. This challenge was one of the reasons why standardizing DID Methods was explicitly out of scope for the first iteration of the DID Working Group. At least one of the objectors believes that to have been a mistake, but will have to concretely articulate how whatever alternate path they propose will lead to a better or more guaranteed outcome.

The definition of what “decentralized enough” meant was a topic of discussion for much of the DID Working Group’s lifetime, and the discussion produced the DID Rubric which lists over 36 different types of decentralization that one might consider when selecting a DID Method. The WG asks that the objectors be concrete in defining which types of decentralization matter to them in a way that will result in consensus for the DID Working Group re-chartering process.

Usefulness of DID Core, by Itself, as a global standard

At least one of the objectors believes that the DID Core specification by itself is not useful enough to publish as a global standard because it does not standardize at least a few “usefully decentralized methods”. The DID Working Group believes that DID Core by itself is useful as a global standard today because it enables software libraries to be written that conform to the DID Document data model (rotatable/revokable public key expression and service descriptions) as well as the interface for resolving a DID Document using a DID Document Resolver. This is the sort of interoperability that the DID Working Group targeted and what the test suite demonstrates today. Standardizing the interfaces that the DID Document provides is useful in and of itself. Further standardization of “usefully decentralized methods” will also be helpful when instructing implementers on how to interact with the ecosystem, but that must be done with great care to ensure that we do not prevent other decentralized methods. It’s not that we don’t have options; it’s that consensus around those options remains elusive for a variety of political and technical reasons as demonstrated by the formal objections.

The DID Working Group asks that at least one of the objectors be concrete about why they don’t believe it is useful to publish DID Core as a global standard. The DID Working Group understands that at least one objector wants us to show “more” interop, but concretely articulating that more interop is possible at this time is challenging because 1) the objections contain conflicting requirements, and 2) there is no consensus around what “usefully decentralized” means; those that utter the phrase appear to mean it to be an objective measure, but upon analysis, it tends to turn into a subjective one. Nevertheless, the objectors will need to make the case why the DID Working Group and implementers are misguided in their request for publication as a global standard and why DID Core, by itself, is not useful enough for it to become a global standard.

Practical Usefulness of did:key and did:web

At least one of the objectors does not believe that did:key and did:web demonstrate the sort of utility that is practically useful. The DID Working Group believes that did:key and did:web are useful. A number of implementers make use of did:key for ephemeral DIDs in production settings, while did:web offers large institutions an on-ramp into the DID ecosystem without having to commit to a “usefully decentralized” DID method.

The DID Working Group was planning to standardize did:key and did:web for practical reasons (people do use these DID Methods, which do exercise most features of DID Core), but the Formal Objections have made us question whether we could put those DID Methods into a charter that wouldn’t receive further Formal Objections because they’re “not decentralized enough”. The DID Working Group asks that objectors propose concrete alternatives to did:key and did:web that will achieve consensus during the rechartering process of the DID Working Group.

Centralized DID Methods

Many of us (objectors and DID Working Group members) do not want to support the registration of “centralized” (by some definition) DID Methods. However, the DID WG expects that many understand that we can’t stop centralized DID Methods from existing, just as we cannot all agree on which factor(s) outlined in the rubric define “usefully decentralized” methods, and it’s better to document the reality of the entire ecosystem than pretend that part of it doesn’t exist. We could refuse to register centralized DID Methods, but then we must make the whole “is it decentralized enough” value judgement when people try to register their DID Methods, which often does not come down to an objective measure.

If any of the objectors would like to pursue this, the DID Working Group would need to understand what concrete set of objective requirements we could apply to all DID Methods to draw a clear line between “centralized” and “decentralized”. Given the hours of discussion this topic has received in the DID Working Group, I expect it will be difficult for the objectors to put forward concrete objective criteria that the group has not already considered.

Sustainability and Conflict Within Ethical Web Principles (“EWP”)

As a general rule, the objectors and the DID Working Group care about sustainability and the W3C Ethical Web Principles (EWP). The DID Working Group would like concrete guidance from the W3C TAG, such as updated sections in the Web Platform Design Principles that are more thoughtful about balancing conflicting EWP requirements, such as may arise between sustainability and innovations in public key infrastructure to support digital human rights. Part of this discussion mirrors the “decentralized enough” issues highlighted above. What is “compliant enough” from an EWP sustainability or EWP freedom of expression perspective? When a solution exposes conflict between various principles, then what is the priority of each principle? What is the burden of proof to demonstrate the magnitude of the effects of any concerns? These questions are larger than the DID Working Group.

Our hope is that the objectors’ concrete guidance here is going to be the same as ours — create guidance that firmly addresses how EWP are to be measured across all W3C specifications and then apply that evenly to all W3C specifications. This is too important to be done piecemeal in a single W3C WG that is not holistically focused on the EWP or the Web Platform Design Principles.

Why does the W3C hate decentralization?

The W3C does not hate decentralization. Much of social media reporting on this incident has confused what is and is not an official W3C position.

W3C is a membership organization that consists of over 450 companies. When there is a new technology that has completed standardization in a Working Group, the entire membership is urged to vote on the standard. One company, one vote; a startup consisting of three people has the same voting power as the biggest technology company. In this case, three of those companies objected (0.6%, a little over half of a percent are concerned about the standard) and the W3C Process, which operates on consensus, and requires that we process those objections. This is a case of a very small minority disagreeing about the standard. It is not the position of the majority of the membership.

In fact, there is work to establish a new Vision for the W3C, firmly rooted in principles, where one of those principles is to “Ensure the Web does not favor centralization.” While it doesn’t go as far as saying “The Web must favor decentralization.”, it is certainly not a position against decentralization. There are many individuals and companies at W3C that believe in decentralization and continue to push the Web to be more decentralized than it is today.

What happens if the objections are upheld?

There will be no official Decentralized Identifier standard for the foreseeable future. If the objections are upheld, the specification will be sent back to the DID Working Group for “further work”. The further work will be determined by negotiating with the objectors on what they want to see changed in the specification or the approach.

Did the DID Working Group follow its charter?

In short, yes it did exactly what was agreed to in the W3C DID Working Group Charter.

The success criteria described in the DID Working Group charter states:

There are 112 DID Methods that have been registered in the DID Method Registry. Of these, 47 DID Method implementations have been submitted to the DID Core test suite with the vast majority passing all features each method implemented.

The interoperability goal of DID Core was at the data model and serialization layer (NOT interoperability within the same DID Method); that is, success was to be measured by how many DID Methods used the same identifier syntax and data model to express features required by the Decentralized Identifier Ecosystem. The DID Test Suite tested 137 normative features in the specification. Implementers ran their implementation output against the test suite and the test suite recorded whether or not their DID Method was conformant with each feature the DID Method implemented. The end result was a demonstration that 47 DID Methods conformed with the DID Core specification; that is, they used the same data model and serialization.

Some of the preliminary DID Working Group Charter proposals included standardizing DID Methods. However, several W3C Members objected to standardizing DID Methods and thus standardizing DID Methods was negotiated to be out of scope when the DID Working Group Chartering discussions happened. The DID Working Group was specifically prevented from ensuring multiple interoperable implementations within a single DID Method. That said, it happened anyway (outside of the WG) to some degree that is elaborated upon in the question about practical interoperability.

Did the DID Core specification get wide review?

Yes, more than many W3C specifications that have been published as global standards. Here are the communities outside of the DID Working Group that reviewed the DID specification, many of which sent representatives to participate in the work over the years before and during the Working Group’s lifetime:

Was practical interoperability achieved?

Given that the goal of DID Core was to ensure that DID Methods used the same identifier syntax and data model to express the same concepts, and we had 47 implementations submitted for testing that did this, yes, there is practical interoperability across DID Methods.

Going above and beyond what was required by our charter, some DID Method implementers, such as for did:key and did:web, have demonstrated interoperability between multiple independent implementations in forums such as those the US DHS Silicon Valley Innovation Program has required of vendors implementing this technology in government programs. The same is true for Canadian government initiatives as well as European Union initiatives.

The DID Working Group seems to be willing to add the topic of standardizing some DID Methods under a future charter.

To explain this from a different angle, it helps to understand how DIDs are used within Verifiable Credentials, which was ratified as a W3C global standard two years ago.

In order to verify a Verifiable Credential that was digitally signed using a public key associated with a Decentralized Identifier, you have to use a couple of things: 1) the DID Syntax, 2) a DID Resolver, and 3) a DID Document.

First, you need to know what a DID looks like – that’s DID Syntax. You then need to feed that DID into something to get a DID Document back – that’s the DID Resolver. Then you need to be able to interpret what you got back in order to find the public key you’re looking for – that’s the DID Document.

To see if you have interoperability at a high level (also known as an integration test), you can take a Verifiable Credential and give it to two different Verifier implementations. If both implementations verify the digital signatures successfully, and use different code bases, you can be fairly certain that practical interoperability exists in the ecosystem. Why is this?

If you look at this from the perspective of a Verifier, the only thing it cares about is that it has a DID, it feeds it to a DID Resolver, and it gets back a DID Document. It doesn’t necessarily care how the DID Resolver gets the DID Document (which is defined by the DID Method), just that the DID Document that it does get is going to be the same as other Verifiers when they run the same process. In other words, how the DID Method works or how resolution happens doesn’t really matter, as long as you can see that multiple code bases get the same DID Document back when Resolving and come to the same conclusion when verifying a Verifiable Credential.

In the first iteration of the DID Working Group, we standardized DID Syntax, the DID Resolver interface, and the DID Document. We didn’t standardize DID Methods because 1) we were asked to aggressively narrow scope by the W3C Advisory Committee, 2) we didn’t feel that the entire community could agree on standardizing any singular DID Method when we chartered the group and the W3C Advisory committee had concerns over “picking a winning DID Method”, 3) we don’t need to do that to demonstrate interoperability for a data model specification, and 4) we can (and did) test for interoperability without standardizing DID Methods (as described above).

You can see this in action today (huge shout out to Charles Lehner and Spruce for putting this tool together) by going to:

https://demo.didkit.dev/2021/08/multiverifier/

Copy-pasting the contents of these pages, which utilize the did:key and did:web Methods respectively, into the tool above:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c-ccg/vc-api-test-suite/main/packages/vc-http-api-test-server/fixtures/verifiableCredentials/case-1.json

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c-ccg/vc-api-test-suite/61d498cd04c45a22b9578774e6a066b59a8f4e94/packages/vc-http-api-test-server/fixtures/verifiableCredentials/case-5.json

… and clicking “Verify”. You’ll see that some of the endpoints fail, but at least five of the vendors pass. This is “practical interoperability” for at least did:key and did:web because many of the passing systems don’t use the same DID Resolver implementation, but successfully resolve the did:key:z6Mki…vJ3 and did:web:vc.transmute.world values into the appropriate DID Documents and use the public key contained within to verify the digital signature.

Does the DID Working Group want to do more than just that? Of course it does! We want to fully specify how some of these DID Methods work, generate thorough test suites for them, and take those specifications through the W3C standardization process. Do we need to do that to demonstrate practical interoperability? Nope, because we have already achieved demonstrating practical interoperability through end-to-end integration testing.

Is the DID specification decentralized enough?

Yes, there are 112 DID Methods where the majority of them are based on more “decentralized” technologies, such as distributed ledgers (did:ion, did:sov, did:v1) or storage-less distributed systems (did:key), than others that are based on centralized systems (did:ccp, did:kr).

The fact that we cannot stop individuals from choosing the systems on which their DID Methods are based should be an indicator that we have achieved to make things decentralized. That said, it became evident early on that not everyone agrees on every type of “decentralization” (governance, computational, political, regional, etc.) that is important for a DID Method. For this reason, the DID Working Group has spent a considerable amount of time creating a DID Rubric that enables organizations to evaluate whether or not a DID Method meets the decentralization criteria that’s important to them. The Rubric currently contains 36 criteria to be considered, a number of them on different axes of “decentralized”.

What the group has discovered over the past several years of pre-standards and standards work is that “decentralization” is not a binary condition, but a multi-dimensional one where different parties weigh each dimension differently. There is no single correct answer with respect to the question of Centralized vs. Decentralized. The DID Working Group did, as much as it could practically do, without imposing draconian rules that at best, wouldn’t be followed, or at worst, could be viewed as censoring the ability of an individual or organization from choosing a solution based on their needs.

The DID Working Group believes that it has achieved the decentralization goals that it intended to achieve and has documented the areas of debate such that others can benefit from the many dimensions of the decentralization vs. centralization debate.

Does the DID specification cause great environmental harm?

The DID specification is a data model specification and thus does not recommend any specific backing technology or network for a decentralized identifier. There is a good article on this particular point here:

https://www.coincenter.org/open-blockchains-and-decentralized-identity-standards/

Some distributed ledgers consume greater computational resources than others. Whether that consumption is warranted or wasteful is an ongoing conversation far beyond the scope of the DID Working Group. Within the Working Group, resource usage has been a regular topic of debate, and like the “centralized vs. decentralized” discussion, the answer largely depends on the requirements of the individual or organization using the DID Method. There is implementation guidance that is currently being written that urges implementers to carefully consider the potential environmental impacts of their DID Methods, as well as additional criteria for the DID Rubric to help people decide which DID Methods best meet their needs.

The DID Working Group is actively addressing this concern in the DID Implementation Guide and the DID Rubric, intends to continue this discussion in future WGs, and welcomes others to contribute to the authoring of this sort of material.

Does the DID specification encourage ever growing divergence?

One property of decentralized systems is not being able to control the number of individuals and organizations that implement the system. The DID Spec Registries provide one mechanism for DID Methods to register, but there is no requirement for them to use it. The nature of a decentralized system is not compatible with a required central authority determining who may do what.

To put the number of DID Methods in perspective, however, we point out that there are currently 346 URI Schemes registered in the IANA URI Scheme Registry, yet many don’t seem to be concerned with an ever growing number of URI Schemes. One of the reasons for this is an inverse power law that comes into play in most markets, where a market over time, will tend to consolidate on a handful of implementation choices. Many modern systems have largely settled on https and webrtc and left gopher and ftp behind; but the consolidation took many years to play out. In the same way, we expect this to happen with DID Methods.

This is already happening to a degree, with many implementers supporting things like did:key and did:web over some of the more esoteric DID Methods. The start of successful technology cycles often start with an explosion of options followed by market consolidation due to the difficulty of supporting every option. This is something that any W3C Working Group has very little control over when introducing new technologies.

The DID Working Group would most likely be open to strategies that would provide healthy nudges to the market to consolidate sooner rather than later, understanding that we have few tools to enforce that in a decentralized ecosystem.

Why the concern over Google and Apple objecting?

NOTE: This question is in the FAQ because it has been asked multiple times by W3C Members and the general public. Note that the concerns raised in this answer are not shared by every member of the W3C, W3C Decentralized Identifier Working Group, or all parties associated with the work on Decentralized Identifiers. The answer highlights what has been articulated as a concern by a number of parties.

Google and Apple are two of the largest identity providers in the world. Google Accounts, Apple ID, Sign in with Google, and Sign in with Apple are a few of the products and services that could be viewed as competing with the W3C Decentralized Identifiers specification. Similarly, the DID Working Group is composed of companies that might compete with Google and Apple’s identity services, and therefore it is important to understand that there is bias in both directions.

Speaking specifically to the concern over Google and Apple; Google Wallet, Apple Wallet, and initiatives such as Apple’s integration of Mobile Driver’s Licenses into an ecosystem that does not allow open competition is of concern:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/14/apple-sticking-taxpayers-with-part-of-the-bill-for-digital-id-rollout.html

There is a belief that some of these systems are not in the best interest of the general public. Here is a statement from the Technical Director of the DHS Silicon Valley Innovation Program commenting on why the approach taken with some of these closed Digital Wallet ecosystems is concerning:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2021Oct/0005.html

The W3C Decentralized Identifier WG, W3C Verifiable Credentials WG, and the Credentials Community Group are working on open wallet ecosystems. Yet another class of products and services that could be viewed as competitive with Google and Apple’s current lines of business.

There is concern over the individuals that work for these corporations being biased in some way by the competing technologies and services that their companies are producing. While these individuals are believed to be unbiased by some and are not expected to just tow tow the company line… it has between suggested that it is inappropriate for them to be a part of the decision making process for their company’s formal objections because it raises doubt over the fairness of the W3C Council Formal Objection process. There is concern that W3C’s reputation might be damaged if there is an unevenness in representation, which might accidentally foment distrust in the process. Media coverage such as these stories highlight this particular concern:

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/01/is-mozilla-trying-to-sabotage-distributed-identity/

https://www.coincenter.org/open-blockchains-and-decentralized-identity-standards/

There was significant effort expended to get many of these “decentralized technology” companies to W3C and convince them that the browser vendors didn’t run the show at W3C. It took years of concerted effort, and it’s exactly this sort of situation that reassures their fears. Members of the DID Working Group have received a substantive number of communications since Apple, Google, and Mozilla’s formal objections, primarily due to the way they were raised and how they’re being processed. That said, the same concern could be levied against the organizations supporting the publication of DIDs as a global standard; they too, have a profit motive and commercial interests. The concern is ensuring that everyone gets to make their arguments on equal footing to the W3C Formal Objection Council, and progress is being made to ensure that that happens.

How long will this take?

There is no time limit set on when objections are upheld or rejected. It is typically done within a month or two of the formal objections being raised, but can drag on for months after that. There is recent news that expects the Formal Objection Council to convene and take up this issue in the early part of 2022.

What could be done in the future to avoid this?

Probably not much; formal objections at the last minute can and do happen. It’s been this way for decades and is unlikely to change. This particular occurrence is especially disruptive because of an experiment that is being run to determine if the new formal objection process is acceptable to the membership.

There is, however, one aspect that the DID Working Group finds distasteful and is currently not being considered for revision. Google, Apple, and Mozilla made no attempt to bring their formal objections to the Decentralized Identifier Working Group since the Working Group started (September 2019), and then during the first transition to Candidate Recommendation (March 2021) and then during the second transition to Candidate Recommendation (June 2021). The first time the group heard of these objections during its two-years of operation was in the days before the poll closed to approve DID Core 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation (global standard).

There are courses of action that the W3C Membership can take to resolve this (but again, this is currently a topic of debate):

Strike down formal objections that made no attempt to engage with the Working Group. Allowing formal objections in the 11th hour accomplishes nothing other than stress, distrust, and drama – three things that should be avoided at a global standards-setting organization such as the W3C. The W3C Process should be predictable, trustworthy, and boring.

Who else has written about this?

There are a number of parties that have written in detail about the DID Core Formal Objections: