At the beginning of the new year, we have great news to share with you all: starting this January, the Ministry of Digital Affairs has officially become a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standard organization. This not only breaks through the past constraint of only being able to join international organizations as a private entity, but it is also a milestone toward the vision of “Plurality”.

At the same time, the Ministry has also joined the FIDO Alliance, which develops and promotes secure and convenient identity standards, becoming the second Taiwanese government unit to become a member after the Ministry of the Interior joined in 2021.

Thanks to the standards set by W3C, websites can be properly displayed on every device, be it a phone, tablet, or computer. In other words, without these standards, even if you have the device, you may not be able to read the website’s content. This means no more seamless streaming, online shopping, or any activity through websites. Its importance to the world is evident.

However, if you want to further interact with other people through the website, such as making videos and publishing articles, you almost always need to register and upload information first. However, account information on a single website often cannot be shared and circulated among different platforms. This not only leads to the monopoly of a few large cross-border platforms, but also limits everyone’s independent right to use data.

Therefore, many communities have developed their own “code portability” solutions, so that everyone can freely choose the most suitable creative environment, fully exercise their data rights, and create more exciting works together. However, there must be a global technical specification to make these solutions truly interoperable with each other.

So in July 2022, W3C launched a brand-new decentralized identity verification standard (DIDs), allowing us to see the dawn of a new generation of digital services. This set of standards allows everyone to directly verify each other’s identities without going through an intermediary service.

We might as well think of this identity mark as an “Internet Passport”. This passport allows everyone to carry their own digital assets; whether it is social posts, photos or videos, it is no longer the cross-border platform that controls these contents, but returns to each creator himself.

If W3C proposes a set of standards for verifying passports, allowing everyone to have their own digital identities; then the FIDO Alliance is responsible for ensuring the security of this passport.

The FIDO Alliance, established in 2013, is an international non-profit organization jointly established by the information industry. Their original intention is to solve the problem of authentication identity. In the past, when logging in to website services, you had to type in your password, which was not only difficult to save, but also faced risks such as account theft and identity fraudulent use.

Therefore, the FIDO Alliance formulated the standard of “password-free login”, and developed various passports for W3C, plus security locks and keys. In this way, everyone can use their passports more safely to roam in the Internet space.

As a member of two major international organizations, the Ministry of Digital Affairs will participate in the formulation of standards according to the needs of all walks of life in Taiwan, and synchronize with the world, and immediately introduce these emerging standards into government agencies, civil society and the industry to practice Plurality – collaborative diversity.