Am I talking to a human or a bot? Is that face on Zoom a real person or gen-AI trained to sound like my boss? Is the software update I allowed coming from the vendor or from an adversary installing malware? Should this user be able to see that content? How much can I trust they are who they say they are?

On Thursday, September 24, 2026, the Internet Governance Project (IGP) will host Identity Online: Shaping Governance Through Digital Identifiers, a workshop at the Washington College of Law, American University, in Washington, D.C. where we’ll unpack the governance challenges of online identification to better understand what’s at stake.

Register for in-person attendance here.

 The program

Four sessions, plus a closing synthesis:

1. Identifiers and Governance: an analytical framework
2. PKI and the Governance of Trust on the Web
3. Identifiers and Content Control: Age Verification and Content Provenance
4. Organizational Identity, Payments and Digital Money

Speakers include researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Münster, and the University of New Hampshire, alongside representatives from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), the Better Identity Coalition, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

The workshop runs as a pre-conference tutorial on Day 0 of TPRC54. Attendance is in person, registration is free, and seating is limited. Register here.

For registration to the remaining 2 day conference at TPRC use this link: https://www.tprcweb.com/registration

Identity is not the same thing as an identifier

Identity is an ontological claim: there is a thing in the world, a person, a machine, a company, or a shipping container, that is distinct from everything else. Identifiers are sets of abstract symbols or tokens that humans create to differentiate among real-world entities for purposes of governance or management. Digital identifiers are therefore always part of an information system that relies on organizational structures and human operation as well as machines to serve a function of communication and control.

Debates about “digital identity” have tended to drift toward privacy and selfhood, while the operative decisions (who issues the tokens, on what evidence, recorded in whose registry, validated against whose root of trust) are made somewhere else and largely out of view.  That is why our focus will be on the political economy of identity system governance, and the interactions of government and private sector actors as they navigate tough policy choices in a rapidly changing identity ecosystem.

Identifiers are everywhere, and they do three things

Utilities number telephone poles. Mobile operators assign 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers to handsets and International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) numbers to subscriber accounts. The Internet has IP addresses, postal systems have regional codes, ad networks have cookies. Governments issue passports, taxpayer numbers, and drivers’ licenses; universities and employers issue ID cards; every online service issues user IDs and authenticates them one way or the other.

Once such a system is in place, it enables three governance functions. Exclusion: identifiers allow an administrator to gatekeep access to information, resources, and physical space. Operational awareness: they make the behavior of identified entities (machines as much as people) visible to whoever runs the system. Accountability: they let a manager assign responsibility and track what was done, to whom it was done, and under what conditions.

That’s why conflicts over identifier systems are rarely just technical. The workshop will open by putting an analytical model on the table, and then spend the day running it over live cases to learn based on what fits the model and what doesn’t. We hope to see you there!

The post Announcing IGP’s Identity Workshop: Shaping Governance Through Digital Identifiers | Sept. 24, 2026 appeared first on Internet Governance Project.