The Importance of the Trustnet

The Importance of the Trustnet

Since trust is ubiquitous in the real world and required almost everywhere, the Trustnet is relevant for every citizen, every company, every organization and every state, in political, economic, ecological and social impact dimensions.
Stylized human faces, floating in a digital space

Political relevance

Ensuring law and order is a central task of the state. Citizens' trust in the state is based on this. Key instruments here are the passport and registration system, a large number of sovereign registers for companies, real estate, animals etc. and the associated processes that function as organisational anchors of trust in the real world. The registers and their processes are used for the sovereign confirmation of identities, identity attributes, rights, legal relationships and relationships between persons or entities. As more and more interactions are being shifted from the real world to the digital world, the state is faced with a variety of challenges to ensure legal certainty in electronic business transactions, e-government, e-business and electronic legal transactions. The above-mentioned instruments must be transferred to the digital world. However, the current introduction of the digital ID card (eID) and qualified electronic signatures are only the first steps in this direction, as they only address the basic identity of living natural persons over the age of 16. The necessary digital transformation of the administration goes far beyond this. Every register extract, whether from the population register, commercial register, land register or other official register, can be converted into a defined machine-readable form (verifiable credential).With the corresponding standardisation of schemes and processes for issuing and automatically checking sovereign digital documents, the state transfers organisational trust anchors from the real world to the digital world and can thus make a massive contribution to trust and legal certainty on the Internet.

Economic relevance

In addition to its political significance, the Trustnet naturally has a very clear economic and business relevance in various dimensions. The first dimension is the economic savings potential of administrative digitisation. Offices and authorities at federal, state and municipal level, as well as municipal companies, are currently still working with analogue processes that tie up vast amounts of personnel and other resources that could be put to better use. In future, the digital trust mechanisms of the Trustnet will offer the possibility of simply "digitising away" personnel-intensive bureaucratic processes by automatically verifying the identities of acting users and information in and on digital credentials. One example of this is the digital citizens' petition process developed in Dresden. The analysis of the business case showed that 5 to 6 employees of the state capital Dresden, who currently do nothing other than manually check the signatures of citizens' petitions, could be deployed for other municipal tasks. When examining other public administration tasks, it quickly became clear that digital transformation of public administration in Germany has so far been approached completely wrongly. The 1:1 transfer of analogue documents and bureaucratic processes into the digital space has so far resulted in almost no process simplification, but rather duplication of work for the public administration. This is neither sustainable nor useful. The lesson from this is simple: digital transformation should no longer be understood as the digitisation of documents. The goal must be to strive for the digitisation and automation of processes.
It is only through the automation of processes that digitalisation can develop its true economic, ecological and social potential.
A study by PWC1 comes to the same conclusion, according to which the public sector in Germany will lack at least one million skilled workers by 2030, which is why the automation of administrative processes is an explicit recommendation of the PWC study, regardless of department or branch. If entire public administration processes are digitised and automated instead of documents in the future, this will also save a huge amount of working time for companies that interact with the authorities. A second dimension is the security of companies and private customers when interacting with international business partners, be it when initiating business contacts or verifying supply chains. One example of this is the annual economic damage caused by fake shops and fake products. It is estimated that product piracy and infringements of intellectual property rights cause 1.5 trillion euros in damage worldwide every year. The placing of fake products on the market, particularly in online trade, will be much easier for customs to detect and trace if sellers can only sell their goods with secure digital identities, i.e. with secure identification of producers, sellers, intermediaries, importers and their goods. A third dimension is the restriction of unauthorised data collection and the data economy. If citizens regain sovereignty over their own personal data and it is no longer given out free of charge and indiscriminately, then this is a declaration of war on unauthorised data collectors and sellers.
A fourth economic impact dimension is the generation of new business models (see Fig. 1). In connection with the Trustnet

New data infrastructures, such as revocation registers or registers for DID documents,

Products, such as wallet apps or privacy tools,

Services such as accreditation, certification, verification of certificates / credentials,

as well as other trust services, IT services and consulting services

Cards emerge from a wallet and merge with the digital space
A person holds his phone near an access gate in order to prove his identity
A tablet showing a digital energy certificate in front of high-voltage lines
are required. The aforementioned change in the data economy also offers opportunities for new business models, e.g. in the area of new CRM systems (Customer Relation Management) or CiRM systems (Citizen Relation Management), whose data never ages.
A table showing the 4 levels of business models with examples
Fig. 1: Overview of possible new business models in the Trustnet context
The Total Addressable Market (TAM) includes the value of every interaction and every service related to the Trustnet. Based on the DigiWorld Yearbook 20202, the global TAM can be estimated at around €350 billion annually.

Ecological relevance

A positive side effect of the Corona crisis was that it suddenly became apparent how much ecological potential there is in digitalization. If meetings are held online instead of in person, huge amounts of energy and CO2 are saved in the transport sector. The same applies to all identification procedures that still require a personal appearance today, be it showing your ID at the vehicle registration office, showing your health insurance card to the doctor or showing your ID to a notary. Every administrative procedure that can be handled completely digitally saves gasoline/diesel/electricity. The ecological potential of the Trustnet in the healthcare application ecosystem, especially for digital transfers and e-prescriptions, is likely to be significantly higher. Use cases that can already be demonstrated include real-time proof of green electricity shares or CO2 certificates.

Social relevance

The Trustnet promises to massively shorten and simplify interactions with authorities. Imagine if you could simply do most administrative tasks online. Imagine if you never had to fill out a form or an online form by hand again because you have the required information in the form of verifiable evidence in your digital wallet and can present it to the authorities in machine-readable form. How much easier and less stressful would life be and how much of your life could be used more sensibly as a result? A second aspect for citizens is the possibility of data economy. Today, significantly more personal data is often requested than is actually necessary. With the Trustnet, the selective release of individual identity features is possible, simply because the data is verifiable. Today, every adult has more than 70 digital identities, each with a login and password. In the Trustnet, 2-3 identities will be sufficient. A third aspect opens up for citizens in the form of a data economy. With the Trustnet, ID holders regain control over their own data and thus the potential to monetize it. With every request to their wallet, a citizen can decide whether they want to demand a consideration for the release of the requested information or whether they want to dictate conditions for the release. The citizen's data sovereignty ultimately promotes data protection and privacy, because it makes unauthorized data collection and trading significantly less attractive or even impossible.

Footnotes

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