Ironic, because the solution that no one wants to hear is an actual internet driver's license, i.e. government-run openid. There's no final recourse more final

Ironic, because the solution that no one wants to hear is an actual internet driver's license, i.e. government-run openid. There's no final recourse more final than going to a place and talking to a person, and no other organization is going to build and staff enough brick-and-mortar offices. One way of thinking about public vs private is, private companies are for cases where we care about efficiency more than fairness and government is for the opposite. Auth seems to have gotten to the "rural electrification" stage, where handling the corner cases fairly is more important than efficiency or innovation.