Legal ownership in the physical world is guaranteed by the highest authorities. Ownership of land and businesses is registered by government agencies. Ownership of physical goods and financial assets is proven by legally binding contracts, receipts and deeds. The all-important evidence of each individual's identity is officially documented in birth certificates, passports and social security numbers.

Who Will Enforce Internet Law?
The same basic concepts of identity, registration and contracts govern ownership on the Internet, but the agencies that operate these mechanisms do not hold the same authority. It's all too new to have reached a similar level of maturity and stability. No wonder, then, that customers feel uneasy about moving their valuable digital assets out of the familiar, physical security of their own premises out into the uncharted territory of the Internet.

What they need is to know that there's a trusted, reliable authority out there that will always be a rock-solid guarantor of their identity and of their ownership rights over their digital assets.

Much has been written of the first faltering steps being taken by Microsoft, with its Passport service, and by the rival Liberty Alliance organization to provide such an agency. Less attention has been paid to the quiet behind-the-scenes work being performed in both camps by VeriSign, the e-commerce authentication and payment services company that also owns top Internet domain registrar Network Solutions.

VeriSign last week took another step towards building that all-important aura of trust and security with the launch of a service to manage and protect the brand identities of big business on the Internet. Some observers who write about VeriSign seem to think the company is scrabbling about trying to build extra revenue to make up for the fall-off in domain registrations now that the Internet bubble has burst. But as Fortune magazine observed in June, the real master plan of its CEO Stratton Sclavos is to build an "Internet utility" that provides the core services on which every other Internet activity will depend.

"In effect, Sclavos has erected the Web's largest toll booth; and now, as more and more of the world's business migrates online, he is poised to extract a usage fee from just about everyone," stated the article. VeriSign's unseen work is slowly building a lynch pin role as the trusted authority that registers electronic identity and ownership. If it succeeds, those revenues will be more like a tax than a toll, because identity and registered ownership literally are the keys to the kingdom of the Internet, and VeriSign will be king of the Internet.