alt Hacker News> why should governments do this? Why can't private companies do it?
A private company will inevitably be looking to maximize their profit. There will always be the risk of them enshittifying the service to wring more money out of citizens and/or shutting it down abruptly if it's not profitable.
There's also the accountability problem. A national ID system would only be useful if one system was widely used, but free markets only function well with competition and choice. It could work similar to other critical services like power companies, but those are very heavily regulated for these same reasons. A private system would only work if it was stringently regulated, which I don't think would be much different from having the government run it internally.
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It could be done similar to how car inspections are done in Texas: price is set statewide, all oil change places do the service, and you redeem a code after.
The problem with this though is the implications of someone at whatever the private entity is falsely registering people under the table - this would need to be considered a felony in order for it to work.
> A national ID system would only be useful if one system was widely used, but free markets only function well with competition and choice.
Isn't this also a problem with having the government do it? E.g. it's supposed to prevent you from correlating a certification that the user is over 18 with their full identity, but it's insecure and fails to do so, meanwhile the government won't fix it because the administrative bureaucracy is a monopoly with limited accountability or the corporations abusing it for mass surveillance lobby them to keep the vulnerability.