Gobbledygook has interviewed CrossRef's Geoffrey Bilder about author identifiers.
Here's an excerpt:
Of course, lots of the same issues can be raised with CrossRef, right? What guarantees that CrossRef won’t become evil and co-opt all of our identities? This, of course is the big fear underlining the knee-jerk reaction against "centralized systems" in favor of "distributed systems". The problem with this, as I mentioned in the FriendFeed thread is that my personal and unfashionable observation is that "distributed" begets "centralized." For every distributed service created, we’ve then had to create a centralized service to make it useable again (ICANN, Google, Pirate Bay, CrossRef, DOAJ, ticTocs, WorldCat, etc.). This gets us back to square one and makes me think the real issue is- how do you make the centralized system that eventually emerges accountable? This is, of course, a social issue more than a technical issue and involves making sure that whatever entity emerges has clearly defined data portability policies and a "living will" that attempts to guarantee that the service can be run in perpetuity- even if by another organization. For the record, I don’t think adopting the slogan "don’t be evil" is enough ;).
