What happened to openideurope.eu: from OpenID to today

If you remember openideurope.eu from 2008, or you found an old link to it, the short answer is: the domain has had several lives, and the site you are reading now is a different project. This page explains what we know about those lives, who stands behind the site today, and what we did with the old addresses. We think readers deserve a plain account.

1. The community site, 2007 to 2009

The domain was registered in 2007 for the OpenID Europe Foundation, a volunteer community that said its aim was to promote the OpenID login standard in Europe. It was presented as a non-profit association under Belgian law with a Brussels address, as described in What was the OpenID Europe Foundation?. The site published news, introduced volunteers who acted as country representatives, and reported on events and on companies that added OpenID. The story is told in the European OpenID community.

The Internet Archive shows regular posts through 2008 and a last blog entry in June 2009. A snapshot of December 2009 shows an archive page of the blog, so the site was still online then, but with little new content.

2. After the community, 2010 to about 2022

From late 2010 the archive shows a parking page saying that the domain might be for sale, filled with unrelated search links. In 2011 a German-language blog appears under the same address with copies of old OpenID news items. Between 2013 and 2016 the archive records technical files of a standard blogging system without recognisable OpenID content. In 2017 and 2018 the address served a Hungarian-language online shop, judging by the archived product and category pages. After that, and from about 2022, it was parked again.

We do not know who ran the domain in those years and make no claims about them. We mention this period only because readers may see old copies of those pages in the archive and wonder about the connection. There is none.

3. Re-registration in 2026

In 2026 the domain was registered again by its current operator, who repurposed it as an independent, bilingual guide to digital identity and login security in Europe. The legal notice names the operator, and our About page explains the project, how it is funded and how to report mistakes. In short, the site is a commercial publication that earns money through advertising and partner links, which are marked.

What we are not

• We are not the OpenID Foundation. The OpenID Foundation maintains OpenID Connect and the OpenID4VC specifications. We have no connection to it, and we do not use its brand or speak for it. ‘OpenID’ is a trademark of the OpenID Foundation.
• We are not the OpenID Europe Foundation or its successor. We have no information about that organisation after 2009, and the history pages on this site rely on public sources only. If you need to know whether it still exists, check the Belgian company registers.
• We are not an official source for any government. For binding rules, read the sources linked from each page, such as EUR-Lex.

What we did with the old URLs

Many addresses of the old site are still linked from elsewhere on the web. We handled them as follows.

• Important pages were kept. The pages about the foundation and its trademark policy exist as historical retrospectives under their old addresses, the foundation and the trademark policy, with a prominent note that they are history.
• Posts were redirected by topic. Where an old blog post covered a subject we now have a page for, such as Clavid, the YubiKey or the Yahoo announcement, the old address forwards permanently to that page. The OpenID timeline shows how the events fit together.
• Country pages lead to today’s guides. The old community pages for each country now point to the current country guides, and the old team overview points to the story of the community.
• Personal pages were not restored. The individual team pages and the posts about single team members contained names, photos and biographies, written for a community that no longer exists. The short posts that welcomed country representatives forward to the community story instead, without repeating the personal details. We did not recreate them, and those old addresses now answer that the page is gone. The same goes for the shop pages of the 2017 period and the old monthly archive pages. This protects people who took part in an enthusiast project fifteen years ago.

Why keep the name

A domain that carries ‘OpenID’ and ‘Europe’ points at the question this site answers: how do Europeans prove who they are online? OpenID tried to answer it with a voluntary standard. The EU now answers it with law and a wallet. The step from one to the other is told in From OpenID to the EU wallet, and what the first attempt teaches is in Five lessons from OpenID for the EU wallet. If you are new to the subject, start with What is a digital identity?.

How this section was written

The history pages rely on two kinds of sources. The first is the public record of the old site as preserved by the Internet Archive, which is where the dates, announcements and company names come from. The second is current information from companies, standards bodies and official publications, which we use to say what became of the things the old site reported. Where the record is silent, for example on the fate of a company or a government programme, we say so instead of guessing.

Corrections

If you were part of the old community and see something wrong, or you want something removed, use the contact details in the legal notice at /imprint/. We will review the request and correct or remove material where it is justified.

Archive observations are based on Internet Archive snapshots of openideurope.eu and its subdomains; the interpretation is ours. Status as of October 2026.