Telecom Italia's Alice adopts OpenID in 2008

On 31 July 2008 the European OpenID blog reported news from Italy: the internet access and portal brands Virgilio and Alice, both belonging to Telecom Italia, were starting to adopt OpenID on their portal and offering an OpenID provider. This page is a historical retrospective. openideurope.eu is today an independent guide with no connection to Telecom Italia, to the OpenID Foundation or to the former OpenID Europe Foundation.

What was reported

The blog described Virgilio and Alice as trademarks or subsidiaries of Telecom Italia, then the largest Italian telephone company. As the post put it, the company had been founded in 1994 through the merger of several state-owned telecoms firms, the most important of which was SIP, the former monopoly operator, and was by then a private company. It said that the portal had begun to adopt OpenID directly and was proposing an OpenID provider at a dedicated web address, and it pointed readers to an Italian-language article about Virgilio becoming an OpenID provider.

The old blog’s headline claim was one of ranking: “After Orange in France, Telecom Italia (Alice) become the 2nd TELCO in Europe to adopt OpenID.” This is the community’s own statement and we did not verify it independently. It is better read as a sign of how the volunteers viewed the field. They tracked each large European company that adopted the standard and counted it as a win.

Why telecom operators were interesting

An internet provider is an obvious candidate for a login provider. It already knows the customer, usually holds a verified name and billing address, runs reliable servers and has a brand that people recognise. In the language of today’s identity world, such a company can offer a stronger link between a login and a real person than a free web account. This is the idea behind levels of assurance, explained in our guide: the more carefully a person was verified when the account was created, the more weight a login can carry.

For OpenID in 2008, the appeal of operators was reach. A single telecom could turn millions of customers into potential OpenID users. This was the same logic that had drawn Yahoo into the field earlier that year. Across Europe, the community also followed smaller providers, such as the Swiss firm in Clavid, Switzerland’s first OpenID identity provider, which added smart-card logins.

What happened next

Telecom operators generally did not become the dominant identity providers of the web. Most users did not go to their access provider’s portal to sign in elsewhere, and the large platforms gave them easier buttons. The Italian situation today, with its national digital identity systems, is covered in our Italy guide.

Corporate history has moved on too. Telecom Italia has since been rebranded as TIM, and, to our knowledge, the Alice brand has been replaced. We could not verify whether the 2008 OpenID provider survived or when it was closed, and so we do not state a date.

Orange and the question of counting

The claim “second telco after Orange” shows how small the field was: two names were enough to form a ranking. It is also unclear by what criteria the community counted, for example whether a test, a pilot or a service for all customers was meant. We have no sources of our own on the Orange service in France, so we repeat the claim only as a quotation of the community of the time.

Reading this episode

A single blog post about one company hardly changes history. But taken together with the 2008 announcements by MySpace, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, it shows a year in which OpenID looked like the common language of identity on the web. The European community’s contribution was to watch and record the continent’s own adopters, rather than to build the technology. The group’s workings are described in The European OpenID community and its local chapters. The protocol behind all of this is explained in OpenID 2.0, and its successor in OpenID Connect, and every date is placed in the OpenID timeline.