What motivates organisations to create IAM standards, and why is it worth asking "cui bono" (who benefits)?

Motives range from simplification and interoperability, idealism and new business fields to economic interests and market power, and even the expansion of monopolies or (state) surveillance. Asking who benefits reveals whose interests a standard really serves.

The motivations behind standards in the IAM field:

• Simplification and interoperability: one protocol that everyone understands instead of a custom integration per partner.
• Economic interests and market power: a company that defines the standard shapes the market around its products.
• Idealism: open, privacy-friendly identity for everyone (much of the early OpenID and SSI work).
• New business fields: a standard creates a market for products, services and certifications.
• Expansion of monopolies, (state) surveillance: a standard can lock customers into one ecosystem, or make it easy to track people across services.

These motives are mixed in almost every real standard. The question "cui bono?" (Latin: who benefits?) is a useful tool when choosing one: Is it open or controlled by one vendor? Does it minimise data, or does it route every login through a central party that sees everything? Does adopting it make it easy or hard to switch providers later? A technically elegant standard can still serve interests that are not yours.

Go deeper:

• Vendor lock-in (Wikipedia) — how proprietary formats and protocols make switching providers expensive.
• Embrace, extend, and extinguish (Wikipedia) — the classic strategy of using open standards to build market dominance.