Most of the world also abuses OAuth — which is for authorizing access to information on your behalf, and is completely orthogonal to identity and authentication

Most of the world also abuses OAuth — which is for authorizing access to information on your behalf, and is completely orthogonal to identity and authentication — for login. If we step back a bit and look at the problem, the main thing that sites should care about is proof. That is, I'm essentially a number (an opaque, abstract identity), and all the site should want is for me to be able to prove that I am that number. We should forget about email addresses, user names and passwords. A site should be able to request real-world identity information such as your name and address, but there's no need to comingle that with login. A site that isn't an e-commerce app generally has no business getting at that data in the first place. Such a system would be a boon to implementors, too. As a developer, I would greatly appreciate not having to implement another damn account/login system just so that I can remember my visitors. But nothing is going to happen until browsers implement such identity management natively, and the only way to get there is for the browser developers to collaborate on the tech.