Exactly. Each of the big players has incentive to be an OpenID provider (control everyone's logins!) but not be an OpenID receiver (accept AOL's logins? are y

Exactly. Each of the big players has incentive to be an OpenID provider (control everyone's logins!) but not be an OpenID receiver (accept AOL's logins? are you kidding?). Nobody at OpenId seems to have quite thought through the incentives here. Identification is not in fact a technical problem. That's trivial. It's a business/social problem. The problem is, "How can I make multi-billion dollar companies want to outsource identification to someone else, given that they're reasonably bright and given that every time in the past that someone else has inserted themselves into another's business, things have gone badly for the insertee?" Businesses look at situations where companies like Ticketmaster and OpenTable have successfully inserted themselves between pre-existing businesses and their customers, and siphoned off a lot of the value of those customers. Then they say, "Gee, maybe I should learn from that and not let someone do that to me." And then the OpenID geeks come calling saying they've got a great solution where all you have to do is outsource your accounts to another multi-billion dollar company and everything will be cool, that other company TOTALLY won't steal your business or anything.