D11.3: Economic aspects of mobility and identity

Title: OUTLOOK

Outlook

Two factors show the strong relation between mobility and identity:

1. Mobility of people requires advanced identity solutions. This could be seen when the GSM Mobile Communication networks were established: A relevant part of their design are the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) and the concept of international roaming, that allow users to be internationally mobile and to use communication services based on their business relations at home and without major organisational overhead.

2. The establishment of the GSM infrastructure has provided the mobile operators with strong instruments to manage identities. Not only are the mobile operators in a stronger position than most fixed-line telephone operators, who only know that their lines lead to a building or a household. The mobile operators are also on the verge of using identity information in other application fields, e.g. marketing and advertising.

For some future developments there are already elements visible:

1. The downturn in the revenues for pure communications drives the telecommunications industry towards new business models, adapted e.g. from the media industry: The revenue for establishing a (mobile) communications connection between two people gets smaller and smaller, so the operators need to search for income elsewhere. At the same time advertising that addresses individuals or at least people in a specific context and with a specific profile becomes worthwhile, as it seems to be promising in the fight for consumers’ attention. So (mobile) telecommunication operators are moving into the field of business matchmaking, which creates many interesting questions on their future role, e.g. as intermediary in a two-sided market: Will this be a sustainable business? Will they have enough trust from consumers for this?

2. The relatively strong identity technology of mobile phones and SIM (chip) cards encourages the use of the mobile infrastructure for applications, that are not directly communication related, e.g. for payment via the mobile phone or for authentication towards accounts (personal bank accounts as well as job related accounts). The fact that mobile phones have a display is of use here. So will mobile phones be the platforms for future identity related business and employee transactions? Will their technology and the mobile communication infrastructure be robust enough for sustainable security in this area?

3. The move towards electronic passports and identity cards communicating with their environment over RFID technology is confronted with a fundamental problem. A passport/ identity card that has only the RFID chip and the corresponding reader to communicate with the outer world has no effective means to check and assess the trustworthiness of the reader. Can mobile phones and SIM card be a model for the “stronger user authentication device”? Or will future passports and identity cards get their own different means of communication? What will the distribution infrastructure for identity of this type look like?

FIDIS Deliverable D11.11 “Future of Mobile Identity - Next Generation Networks and Mobile Services” will aim to answer some of these and related questions.